case-sensitivity

[Jay O'Connor]

On Wed, 12 Nov 2003 12:53:18 -0500, Peter Hansen <peter at engcorp.com>
wrote:

>Douglas Alan wrote:
>> 
>> I agree with Alex.  Case sensitivity is evil!  When color monitors
>> started becoming common, I began to worry that programming languages
>> would come to allow you to have blue variable names, and red and green
>> variables names, and they would all be different.  Or maybe even
>> variable names in mixed color!  Then in mixed color and font.  I
>> better be quiet now, lest I give anyone ideas.
>
>Not a bad idea... although the implementation would probably require
>something like using a special suffix to represent the colour, so the
>file could still be saved as ASCII.  The editor would of course have
>to be smart enough to translate this suffix into the appropriate colour,
>and then suppress the suffix.  I'm sure vi and that other editor,
>whatever it's called, could do that.

There's a guy named Roedy Green, I believe, who hangs out in
comp.lang.somethingorother who has been advocating something pretty
close to this for a while.  Except that he advocates using a database
based code management so you could store more meta information about
the code in the DB along with the text.  This shows up onc.l.smalltalk
occasionally because most Smalltalk implementations do not use
text-file based code management so it fits in well with Smalltalk
schemes already