Case sensitive and ludicrous statements

[David Eppstein]

In article <7xk758iaso.fsf at ruckus.brouhaha.com>,
 Paul Rubin <http://phr.cx@NOSPAM.invalid> wrote:

> > You will notice that CamelCase was extremely uncommon (if used at all)
> > before the advent of case-sensitive languages, and there is good
> > reason for this.  It didn't make sense then, and it doesn't make sense
> > now!  (In a case-insensitive language.)
> 
> The convention always annoyed me, but I think it was customary in the
> old days of Smalltalk.  When object-oriented programming became a fad
> in the 80's, it spread into other languages from there.

This doesn't make sense to me as an explanation.  Smalltalk didn't reach 
much of a mass audience until Goldberg's book was published in 1983, and 
other object-oriented languages (e.g. C++) did not immediately adopt 
CamelCase (I see none in Stroustroup's 1986 C++ book).  In the meantime, 
CamelCase (with or without the initial capital) was certainly used prior 
to 1983 in languages such as Pascal.

-- 
David Eppstein                      http://www.ics.uci.edu/~eppstein/
Univ. of California, Irvine, School of Information & Computer Science