Language change and code breaks

[Konrad Hinsen]

Guido van Rossum <guido at python.org> writes:

> case-insensitive, until the designers of Unix and C decided that it
> was too much work to write and use a case-insensitive comparison
> routine.  It wasn't necessarily intended to be better, just easier to
> implement.  But times have changed, and that's a lousy excuse.

Whatever the original reason was, many people have put case
sensitivity to good use for implementing naming conventions. For
example, I find it useful in my Python code to capitalize class names
(and nothing else), and then use a lower-case name otherwise identical
to a class name to indicate the expected type of a parameter to a
function.

If computing were to start from scratch, I'd perhaps favour a
case-insensitive approach everywhere. But I can't say I ever had a
problem with case sensitivity.

Konrad.
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