Yet Another Case Question

[Steve Holden]

"David Mertz, Ph.D." <mertz at gnosis.cx> wrote ...
[...]
>
> Many of the folks who argue for case-sensitivity perceive the negative
> effect as being small or non-existent.  Quite likely, most of them are
> towards the visual end of things, and the relative stumbling block of
> finding the correct case for a term is less for them than for me.
>
Well, in my own case it's so likely I'll mistype something that
case-sensitivity doesn't really add much extra overhead. Of the many typos I
make, case transposition is a very small subset.

> But in all this latest discussion (and in the prior ones about the same
> matter), I do not think I've really seen any explanation of a POSITIVE
> benefit to case-sensitivity (as a language feature).  I am quite willing
> to believe there are some... but I just don't know what they are.
>
Well, the only POSITIVE benefit I can think of it that it's easiest to tell
learners that a variable name must always be written in EXACTLY the same
way. This does lend certainlty to the learning process.

> I'd like to rule out several answers, however.  I think some frequent
> remarks are really misleading on this.
>
>  NON-ANSWERS:
>  - If a language were case-insensitive, users would use absurdly mixed
>    case variables, e.g.  "maXImUMCoLumnS".  This is just factually
>    false--many millions of lines of code in existing case-insensitive
>    languages fail to show such a problem.
>  - Case-sensitivity allows conventions such as allcaps CONSTANTS.  Such
>    conventions are indeed good... and are widely used in
>    case-insensitive languages as well.

But if the language is case-insensitive, the variable "constant" will
conflict with the constant "CONSTANT".

>  - Programmers should learn mental discipline by learning to remember
>    casing.  There's plenty of learning to go around either way,
>    arbitrary games are not any plus.

Case-insensitivity, however, makes it less likely that case-based
conventions will be respected.

>  - If names were case-insensitive, string literals would have to be so
>    too.  With all due respect to my friend Tim Churches, this notion is
>    just plain whacked.

Whatever. Cold Fusion with Access, for example, does implement
case-insensitive compatrison with the contents of database fields. And let's
not even start to think about VBScript's case-insensitivity with respect to
collection keys.

>  - Case-eating nano-viruses will invade our source code.
>  - People naturally learn case as part of spelling.  Overwhelmingly,
>    this claim is false; far more ofte in ordinary usage, case varies in
>    ways that have nothing to do with the referents of terms.  Almost
>    always, case follows other context, or is just randomly varied.  In a
>    few borderline situations, case-sensitive names actually are used
>    outside of programming languages.
>
Frankly I'm so tired of seeing ignoramuses using apostrophes to indacte the
plural rather than the possessive, and "its" used where "it's" is
appropriate (and vice versa) that I begin to feel that some discipline is
not a bad thing ... as long as it actually HURTS!

>  SEMI-ANSWERS:
>  - The convention about instances and classes:  "person = Person()" is
>    fairly elegant.  I agree.  But other conventions are possible too
>    that would achieve a similar effect.
>
Right. We could start all class names with "cls", for example. Didn't some
Hungarian guy suggest this some time ago?

> Yours, David...

regards
--
Steve Holden                                  http://www.holdenweb.com/
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