Case-sensitivity: why -- or why not? (was Re: Damnation!)
Phil Austin
phil at geog.ubc.ca
Sun May 21 14:55:09 EDT 2000
François Pinard <pinard at iro.umontreal.ca> writes:
> "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.
Actually modern Fortran is still case-insensitive -- the existing code
base is simply too large to consider changing this.
As another data point, I teach Python to 3rd-year Earth science
students, and haven't noticed any particular problems related to case.
About half of these students have programmed previously in Matlab
(case sensitive) or C++, but the rest are new to programming. (The
single biggest issue is mutable vs. immutable variables in functions.)
Phil
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