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

[François Pinard]

scarblac-spamtrap at pino.selwerd.nl (Remco Gerlich) écrit:

> François Pinard wrote in comp.lang.python:
> > "Juergen A. Erhard" <jae at ilk.de> écrit:

> > > Actually, I couldn't even name a case-insensitive language
> > > offhand... and I doubt they are really easier than case sensitive ones.

> > Some among the oldest FORTRANs, maybe.  COBOL, I don't know.  Scheme.
> > HTML.

> Pascal (therefore, Delphi). Visual Basic.

I did a great deal of work in Pascal in older times, and now remember that
we soon modified the Pascal system so it became not only case-sensitive,
but also able to accept French diacritic marks in identifiers.  This might
have been the most pleasurable programming environment we ever had, at
least in that eon.

That's mainly why I forgot to name Pascal in the list above.

LOGO, yes...  One of the most unreadable languages I worked with.
Maybe children had enough Pavlovian rewards, seeing turtles move and beep,
with psychologists, epistemologists and protocolists cheering them all
along, to learn it nevertheless.  Despite AI people (the adult ones :-)
did write analysers, assemblers, loaders, and other monsters, LOGO just
does not scale for real work.  Hardly an example of good design.

I wonder if the case-insensitivity of LOGO is not just a side-effect that
the project was given a lot of lowercase-less terminals in its beginnings.
A good way at the time for some hardware manufacturers to dump their now
obsolete hardware for a noble cause, and more credibly, some publicity. :-)

-- 
François Pinard   http://www.iro.umontreal.ca/~pinard