Case-sensitivity: why -- or why not? (was Re: Damnation!)

[Matthew Dixon Cowles]

In article <39276946.90FE82A2 at san.rr.com>, Courageous
<jkraska1 at san.rr.com> wrote:

[snip]
> The truth of the matter is that, irrespective of whether or
> not a language is case sensitive or not, using inconsistent
> case for the same thing is an extraordinarily bad idea, and
> would be extremely poor engineering practice.
[snip]

I certainly agree that inconsistent capitalization of identifiers would
be a bad idea. But I think that distinguishing identifiers by
capitalization alone would be an equally bad idea.

NewtonScript, the language used to program the old Apple Newtons is
similar in many respects to Python (high-level, highly dynamic,
object-oriented, byte-code compiled, etc.). It is
case-preserving-but-ignoring. I haven't used NewtonScript in some
years, but I don't recall any problems that were caused by its being
case-insensitive. Indeed, I don't even remember anyone mentioning that
aspect of the language. It's true that the projects NewtonScript was
used for weren't enormous, but many were distinctly non-trivial.

Regards,
Matt