Case Sensitivity and Learnability

[claudius at catlover.com]

Paul Prescod <paul at prescod.net> says:
>If the IDE normalizes case for you, what's the problem?
>
>One of Visual Basic's great features is that the IDE helps you *a lot*
>to get things right. It is perfect for newbies. Python's case
>sensitivity would not be a problem if there was an IDE that detected
>when you had misused case and corrected it for you (...this probably
>requires type annotation....)
>
>Maybe the CP4E *debugger* should detect case sensitivity problems at
>runtime and should just "fix up" the source code.

I much prefer the MS Word spellchecker paradigm, underline the word(s) that are
"offending" and offer up some suggestions.  It teaches better coding in the
long run and is much easier to code (since it doesn't need to be 100% accurate,
the user can always tell the editor to ignore and the feature can be turned
off.)