Case Insensitivity (was Language change and code breaks)

[Konrad Hinsen]

"Tim Hochberg" <tim.hochberg at ieee.org> writes:

> I expect there will always be people who come to python expecting it to be
> case sensitive as well as those new programers who supposedly expect it to
> be case insensitive.

Actually I wonder what exactly is the problem of those "new
programmers". I have been teaching Python occasionally to scientists.
Many of them made case mistakes initially, but none of them had a
problem with understanding case sensitivity as a concept. When they
did type the wrong case, they noticed the problem immediately when the
"Name Error" occurred. The problem for them was *remembering* in which
case a given name was, rather than making the distinction. The
solution to that problem would seem to be naming conventions, not a
case insensitive language.

Of course my experience with scientists may not be typical for
beginners in general. But before curing a problem, we should know what
it actually is. Did anyone ever do a study on this? All I have seen is
anecdotical evidence (including mine, of course). Could we get input
from someone who does Python teaching sufficiently regularly?

Konrad.
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