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

[Will Rose]

Mike Fletcher <mfletch at tpresence.com> wrote:
: Personally, I have been bit by case problems probably five or six times (in
: five years or so).  That said, I find working with case insensitive
: languages difficult to the point where I will not use them (particularly in
: large projects, and particularly where there are multiple people working on
: the project).  In general, I find that I don't "read" variables, rather I
: "recognize" them as I gaze at entire blocks of code, largely based on their
: graphic representation (which is largely based on the pattern of character
: glyphs). Case insensitive languages make this "recognition" difficult
: (particularly when different programmers use different capitalization
: patterns).

[... good ideas snipped ...]

I think the problem is not case-sensitive vs. case-insensitive, it's
case-sensitive/case-preserving vs. case-insensitive/case-preserving.
I have no problem reading COBOL or early BASIC in monocase (apart
from the obvious problems of the languages).  It's when one token
can have several different forms that the problems start.

Again, you can get away with anything if you have a small amount of code.
The problems start when large amounts of code, or large numbers of
developers, use different conventions.   It would be nice if the
language enforced reasonable default rules, and if Python must be
case-insensitive to be used in education, I'd suggest enforcing the
use of upper or lower case only, rather than mixed case.  That seems
the least bad option; not much more of a nuisance than the current 
whitespace rules.


Will
cwr at cts.com