Case Sensitive, Multiline Comments

[John Roth]

"Duncan Booth" <duncan.booth at invalid.invalid> wrote in message 
news:Xns96635F84E6901duncanbooth at 127.0.0.1...
> Dennis Lee Bieber wrote:
>
>> On 26 May 2005 17:33:33 -0700, "Elliot Temple" <curi42 at gmail.com>
>> declaimed the following in comp.lang.python:
>>
>>> Thanks for the link on case sensitivity.  I'm curious about the person
>>> who found case sensitivity useful though: what is it useful for?
>>>
>>      Making a language run faster on slow machines since the syntax
>> parsing doesn't have to do the equivalent of upper or lower casing
>> anything that is not a string literal before checking for keywords or
>> identifiers.
>>
>>      Consider the time spent by languages like Ada and Fortran when
>> they have to do case normalization every time you compile.
>>
> That isn't a good argument for case sensitivity. You really aren't going 
> to
> be able to measure a slowdown in compilation speed just because the
> compiler has to lowercase all the identifiers before using them.

Actually it is, but you have to get out of ASCII into the wider world
of all of the real languages out there. Something I heard from one of the
people who invented XML is that it originally started out as case
insensitive, and they had quite an extensive discussion about it. When they
made it case sensitive, one of the basic tools sped up by a factor of three.
Doing case translations in Unicode following all of the rules for all of the
world's languages is, for want of a better world, a real bitch.

John Roth