Case Sensitivity and Learnability

[Neel Krishnaswami]

Tim Peters <tim_one at email.msn.com> wrote:
> 
> The great thing about newbies is that they pay no attention whatsoever to
> arguments about how they should behave <0.9 wink>.  I recently posted a link
> to Matt Conway's doctoral dissertation (see DejaNews), where his project's
> difficulties in using Python in a newbie-oriented system are explained.  The
> Alice system ships with a modified interpreter that ignores case (and also
> treats int/int as a floating-point operation).

Well, I'd prefer Python to be case-insensitive, just as a matter of my
own preference. Eyeball grep is for me basically case-insensitive, and
I have spent hours trying to find bugs caused by case errors, because
my eyes just slide over the difference.

Python is pretty good about reporting where the error occurred, so
it's rarely more than 10 or 20 minutes of wasted time here, even when
I just give up and rewrite all the code in question. It's still not
fun though.


Neel