Considering migrating to Python from Visual Basic 6 for engineering applications

[Chris Angelico]

On Sat, Feb 20, 2016 at 2:34 AM, BartC <bc at freeuk.com> wrote:
> On 17/02/2016 19:49, wrong.address.1 at gmail.com wrote:
>
>> Could someone kindly tell me advantages and disadvantages of Python?
>
>
> Something I don't think anyone has mentioned is that Python is
> case-sensitive.
>
> So keywords, identifiers, library functions and so on have to be written
> just right. (For example the identifier "abcdef" can be written 64 different
> ways, such as "aBCdEf", and they will all be different symbols.)
>
> This is a complete pain if you're used to a language that ignores case
> (except in data). But pretty much every language now is the same, you can't
> do much about it, you just need to be aware of it.

Indeed. Most languages are case sensitive, because it's too risky to
do anything else. Python 3 allows you to use other scripts than the
basic Latin letters in the ASCII set:

>>> привет = "hello"

and of course you wouldn't expect that to collide with something
written in a completely different script. As far as the interpreter's
concerned, "P" and "p" are just as different as are "A", "Α", "А", and
so on.

Like with Fortran's peculiar freedom in whitespace, case insensitivity
in identifiers is an unwanted relic of a past age.

ChrisA