Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!husc6!cmcl2!nrl-cmf!ames!pacbell!att-ih!ihnp4!inuxc!iuvax!bsu-cs!dhesi
From: dhesi@bsu-cs.UUCP (Rahul Dhesi)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.misc
Subject: case sensitivity
Message-ID: <2318@bsu-cs.UUCP>
Date: 10 Mar 88 16:31:48 GMT
Reply-To: dhesi@bsu-cs.UUCP (Rahul Dhesi)
Organization: CS Dept, Ball St U, Muncie, Indiana
Lines: 24

Just an opinion:  case sensitivity in a programming language is not in
itself a bad thing.  It is how it is used that can cause problems.

In Modula-2 reserved words are required to be in uppercase while names
of standard procedures are in mixed case.  Thus one must be constantly
using the shift key.  This is painful.

In C reserved words and standard functions are in lowercase.  By simply
not using uppercase letters one gets all the advantages of a
case-insensitive language without any hassles.  There are just a very
few words that need to be typed in uppercase (e.g. FILE and NULL).

Thus case-sensitivity in Modula-2 is a bad thing but in C it is nearly
irrelevant to those who don't care for it.

Those who enjoy hassling users with names like WriteString (or
WrItEsTrInG etc.) can still use them in C, though the availability of
printf() and putstr() makes them superfluous.

So, if the case-sensitivity of Modula-2 is a drag, it is so because of
some bad language design decisions, not because case-sensitivity is in
itself bad.
-- 
Rahul Dhesi         UUCP:  <backbones>!{iuvax,pur-ee,uunet}!bsu-cs!dhesi