Case Sensitive, Multiline Comments

[Mike Meyer]

"Elliot Temple" <curi42 at gmail.com> writes:

> Hi I have two questions.  Could someone explain to me why Python is
> case sensitive? I find that annoying.

Because it comes from a language background of case sensitive
languages (C, shell, etc.). But read what the BDFL has to say about
it: <URL:
http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-list/2001-July/054788.html >

Personally, I think anyone who has two variables whose names differ
only in case should be shot. No, let me extend that - anyone who has
two variables whose names would be pronounced the same should be
shot. I've had to debug such code, and it ain't fun.

Variables whose name differs from the class they are instance of only
in case is the only allowable exception. And should be used with care.

On the same note, anyone who spells a variable name with different
cases because the languge is case-insensitive should be shot. I want
to be able to use various source analysis tools without having to
worry about dealing with two different ascii strings being names for a
single variable.

Add those two together, and you'll see that *I don't care*. I consider
taking advantage of a language being case-sensitive or
case-insensitive to be a bad idea, so it doesn't matter what the
language does.

>  Also, why aren't there
> multiline comments?  Would adding them cause a problem of some sort?

Because no one every really asked for them. After all, there are two
formats for multi-line strings, which the interpreter will build and
then discard. There are tools that recognize multi-line strings after
function/method definitions and treat them as function documentation.

Adding multiline comments probably wouldn't be a problem - you'd just
have to come up with an introductory character sequence that can't
occur in the language (not that that stopped C). But you'd have to get
someone to write the code, then someone with commit privs to decide it
was useful enough to commit. That seems to be a lot of work for very
little gain.

       <mike
-- 
Mike Meyer <mwm at mired.org>			http://www.mired.org/home/mwm/
Independent WWW/Perforce/FreeBSD/Unix consultant, email for more information.