Case insensitivity

[Gustavo Niemeyer]

> easily learn to work with case-insensitive systems.  It's possible
> that most programmers have case-sensitive minds, but I think that most
> non-programmers probably have case-insensitive minds.  And
> non-programmers are quite the majority.  *If* there is any hard
[...]
> It has been argued that case-sensitivity is a minor wart that's easily
> explained.  I find that a weak argument.  Lots of minor problems can
> be explained and gotten used to, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't
> try to get rid of them if we can.  Historically, this argument has
> been used as an excuse for poor compilers or linkers.

Maybe we should also allow constructions such as

print "hello world" if var is true

since that's the way non-programmers think.

Indeed, I don't think case-sensitiveness is something that will help
non-programmers to get used to the language. You have so many factors
to learn when you're starting, case sensitiveness will be just one more
behavior of the language (not a wart at all).  On the other hand, I
think that, if you create a case-insensitive tool or command line option
and let users get used to it, it'll take forever to learn how to program
in sensitive mode.

[...]
> what's wrong with that?  (If you really feel that being a programmer
> makes you part of an elite and you want to keep others out of that
> elite, I pity you.)

That's not the point at all.

[...]
> It's been argued that it's convenient to be able to write c = C(),
> where C is a class and c is an instance of that class.  Surely there
> are other conventions we can use.

Sure, but I could tell you the same argument you've used when saying that
"people can get used to case-sesitive programming" is not enough. It
woulnd't be nice to force people using a different (and uncommon?)
naming scheme just because they "can" learn.

> 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.

Besides the implementing-partially problem I've introduced above, if you
changed the language, you'd get a lot of happy people saying "Alleluia!"
and a lot of unhappy people saying "Damn Guido!". :-)

-- 
Gustavo Niemeyer

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