Case-sensitivity: why -- or why not? (was Re: Damnation!)
Will Rose
cwr at crash.cts.com
Sun May 21 12:24:51 EDT 2000
ben at co.and.co wrote:
: [ Lots of things about case-sensitivity and readability already said ]
: I don't know about alice, but I think the quest for case-insensivity is
: masking the problem at hand:
: class Employee:
: def __init__(self, salary=0):
: self.Salary = salary
: def set_salary(self, salary):
: self.salary = salary
: The problem is: there's no way to check a python program without running
: it, and without variable declarations there's no way to catch errors
: like these. Case-insensitivity is not going to help:
[...]
Yes, to me this is a weakness in Python. I once got badly bitten (two
days debugging) when a Basic program automatically created a (misspelled)
variable and initialised it; since then I've been a big fan of
declaration before use. (Why the misspelling wasn't caught by inspection
is another issue - suffice to say that my default scratch integer
variable is now j not i. I have finally broken away from Fortran IV
conventions!).
However, I don't use Python as a classic interpreter; I always use an edit,
'compile', run, cycle, so my programs could in principle be statically
analysed. Python is designed to be used from the interpreter command
prompt, and so a lot of static checking (I don't know how much) isn't
really practical.
Will
cwr at cts.com
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