Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!husc6!uwvax!oddjob!hao!ames!pacbell!att-ih!ihnp4!inuxc!iuvax!bsu-cs!dhesi From: dhesi@bsu-cs.UUCP (Rahul Dhesi) Newsgroups: comp.lang.misc Subject: Re: case sensitivity Message-ID: <2345@bsu-cs.UUCP> Date: 12 Mar 88 06:05:40 GMT References: <2318@bsu-cs.UUCP> <2758@csli.STANFORD.EDU> Reply-To: dhesi@bsu-cs.UUCP (Rahul Dhesi) Organization: CS Dept, Ball St U, Muncie, Indiana Lines: 31 In article <2758@csli.STANFORD.EDU> kasper@csli.UUCP (Kasper Osterbye) writes: >Case sensitivity is always a drag. Someone always will use >the TWO variables i and I, and I will get quite confused. Well, I almost agree with this. Using both i and I could be bad practice, but not if one is consistently using i, j, k etc. to mean something and I, J, K, etc. to mean something related. If mathematicians can do it (and have done it) for centuries, it can't be that confusing. The programer who is committed to writing bad code is hard to ST0P. (Or was that STOP? Darned language allows both ST0P and STOP to be used. They really ought to make O and 0 equivalent...and what's this nonsense about "ioctl" and "ioctrl" and "iocntl" and "iocntrl" being different? A properly-designed language would do a Soundex encoding on variables so we would not accidentally use two variables that could be confused with each other. And while we're at it, we really ought to require each numeric literal to have a check-digit, so if a programmer mistypes 356 as 365, the error will be detected at compile time... unless, of course, if the programmer miscalculates the check digit...so better make that three check digits, so if they are miscalculated, the error will be immediately detected.) >I like a language >to treat WriteString as the same identifier as writestring, but I like >that I can write it both ways. On the contrary, if somebody uses both WriteString and writestring, that is clearly a typing error that should be detected by the compiler. -- Rahul Dhesi UUCP: !{iuvax,pur-ee,uunet}!bsu-cs!dhesi