Language change and code breaks

[Keith F. Woeltje]

FWIW, I am also in the "sometime programmer" group, and don't find case 
sensitivity to be an issue. Even though Pascal (case insensitive) was my 
first language, I was always taught to use consistent case, and case 
sensitivity was never an issue. I suspect that Konrad Hinsen's 
experience can largely be extrapolated: most people bright enough to 
figure out loops, conditional statements, and the other "basics" of 
programming are probably bright enough to understand that "a" != "A". 
Surely correcting what is most likely a modest speedbump on the road to 
learning Python isn't worth breaking a lot of existing code.
 >K

Tim Randolph wrote:

> "Guido van Rossum" <guido at digicool.com> wrote in message
> news:mailman.995571273.18192.python-list at python.org...
> 
>>(2) Potentially, the group of non-programmers is much larger than the
>>    group of programmers (and it's easier to teach programmers an
>>    arbitrary rule than non-programmers).
>>
> 
> I think the distinction between programmers and non-programmers misses a
> third important group: "sometime programmers"  -- people who code
> occasionally to for fun or to solve problems, but aren't in the trenches (or
> the cubes) day in and day out.
> 
> As a member of this group, who is especially fond of Python for how easy it
> is to pick up where I left off days or weeks before, I would very much
> prefer a case *insensitive* language with tools that enforce *uniform* case
> usage.
> 
> Nobody wants to see fOo and FOO and foo with the same meaning, but nobody
> wants to see foo and FOO and foo at all in the same program with distinct
> meanings.  I also don't think the cutesy c=C() makes for readable code -- at
> least for this sometime programmer.
> 
> 
> little-logs-can-make-for-warm-fires-ly yrs,
> 
> Tim Randolph
> 
> 
>>--Guido van Rossum (home page: http://www.python.org/~guido/)
>>
>>
> 
>