case-sensitivity

[Ron Adam]

On Wed, 12 Nov 2003 18:04:54 GMT, joconnor at cybermesa.com (Jay
O'Connor) wrote:

>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


Sounds a bit like the windows registry.   Since it's there, why not
put a bunch of other stuff in it.   <sarcastically>  Wouldn't that
just be fantastic.  <and even more sarcastically>  Then we could have
everything in one convenient place!  

I hope nobody is thinking of that approach seriously.   It may work
well in places where the use is naturally limited in both scope and
degree,  but it becomes unmanageable when the size and content are
allowed to grow with no limits on them.

_Ron Adam