Case Sensitive, Multiline Comments

[Mike Meyer]

Dennis Lee Bieber <wlfraed at ix.netcom.com> writes:

> 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.

Hopefully, this should be minimal. You canonicalize them all as soon
as you realize you can. With proper language design, this may be as
soon as you recognize that they aren't in a string.

This brings to mind the reason I quit using Microsoft products. I was
writing z80 assembler, and habitually wrote everything in lower case,
including all the op codes.

The assembler refused to recognize the indexed instruction opcodes
that were present on the z80 but not the 8080. I double-checked the op
codes, did the "delete and retype" thing, and in general went crazy
trying to figure out what was wrong.

I eventually called Microsoft and asked. The answer was "Those have to
be in upper case." That told me enough about the insides of MS
software that I swore off it, and have never purchased an MS product
since.

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