Case insensitivity

[Arthur Siegel]

Guido writes - 

>I apologize for my poor English -- I don't know what you mean by "an
>affection" or "an affect".  Consulting a dictionary didn't help, but
>I'm guessing that you mean something that gets in your way when
>programming.

The poor English is all mine, for which I apologize.  

The correct word is affectation, which I used in the sense of:

"manner of speech or behavior not natural to one's actual
personality or behavior"

Implies artificial.

>To me, the only real important question is, how can we introduce
>case-sensitivity for novices without breaking the millions of lines of
>existing Python code.  One option could be: forget it, it's too late.
>Another: put the case-insensitivity in the tools.

But I have also been trying to ask you to define a term - "novice".

Seems to me it is clear that the needs of someone with an interest
in learning programming is a novice in a whole different sense
than someone with no such interest.

That seems obvious, but you do seem to point time and
again to circumstances in which the goal is for the subject
to accomplish something specific - and the set-up is specifically
to insulate them from an understanding of programming.  *Not*
to motivate them to achieve it.

Anything you might *continue* to do to make an understanding
of programming accessible to those interested in such an
understanding, I would certainly support.  I happen not to
believe focusing on case-sensitivity is at all a core issue
for that audience. But that, as they say, is me.

To spend any significant energy to cater to the novice in
the other sense - the novice who combines a lack of
experience with a lack of interest in the subject matter
of programming... well if I were you, I'd let myself off
that hook.

ART