Yet Another Case Question

[Martijn Faassen]

John Machin <sjmachin at lexicon.net> wrote:
> I wouldn't call it "flawed product development"; "flawed" certainly,
> but "product development" tends to indicate that some thought went
> into the process. My contention is that no thought about the
> difference between bitwise equality and semantic equivalence went into
> the "designs" that caused the above examples,

I think that the only right place for such semantic comparisons 
("foo bar" versus "foo  bar" for instance) belongs somewhere off in some
module, not in the language itself. I mean, such semantic equivalent is
entirely context dependent and the language can't do this for you.
The language shouldn't try to guess here.

> and not much thought
> (pax Guido; he wanted to fix it in Python) went into the products
> called "languages" who say that "foo_bar" is not semantically the same
> as "fooBar".

I think that given much thought it still makes some sense to choose
simplicity in the implementation (see Zen of Python) here. Even though
Guid wants to fix this issue in PEP 3008. :)

(did you read my posting on that? I'm not sure if your line was informed
by that posting or ..)

Regards,

Martijn
-- 
History of the 20th Century: WW1, WW2, WW3?
No, WWW -- Could we be going in the right direction?