Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!mcvax!enea!sommar
From: sommar@enea.se (Erland Sommarskog)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.misc
Subject: Re: case sensitivity
Message-ID: <2835@enea.se>
Date: 12 Mar 88 11:06:49 GMT
References: <2318@bsu-cs.UUCP>
Reply-To: sommar@enea.UUCP(Erland Sommarskog)
Followup-To: comp.lang.misc
Organization: ENEA DATA AB, Sweden
Lines: 50

Rahul Dhesi (dhesi@bsu-cs.UUCP) writes:
>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.  

So the argument against using uppercase letters should by the use of the 
shift key? But then English must be a pain as well. Not talking of any
programming language that uses operators like !"#$%&/() for which you
need the shift key.

More seriously I think the use of mixed key in identifier names is a
virtue. Why call something averylongnamewhichyoubarelycannotread when
you can call AVeryLongNameWhichIsYetEasyToReadAtFirstGlance? OK, you
may use underscores instead of case shifts. However, there is a drawback
if the compiler has low limit of significant characters.

The good point with having the reserved words in uppercase like in 
Modula-2 is that they stand out much more and highlights the structure.
(Provided of course that you don't use uppercase in your identifiers!)
Personally I find to read programs just in lowercase as quite unreadable.

I am a little ambvivalent whether against case sensitivity as such, but
I tend to be in favour for it. (In languages that is. In a Unix it's pain
and nothing else.) The reason is that is quite confusing to see a variable
sometime called "Count" and sometimes "count". Did he mean anything by
that? Also I recall spending my time to find a bug in the following 
scenario: 
   Program ....
   Const  WORDLENGTH = 80;      (* Which *is* one word in Swedish *)
   .....
      Procedure ....
      var WordLength : integer;
      ... 
         If WordLength < 20 then
For me "WORDLENGTH" and "WordLength" were two different entities so
I couldn't just understand why the machine thought all words were longer
than 20 letters. Took quite a while until I realized what happened.

Finally on reserved words: Ideally I think they should be accepted in
any case, to not bind to the programmer too much to a style he may
dislike. And anyway it's quite folly to declare a variable called "else".
-- 
Erland Sommarskog       
ENEA Data, Stockholm        
sommar@enea.UUCP           "Si tu crois l'amour tabou...
                            Regarde bien, les yeux d'un fou!!!" -- Ange