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From: rob@raksha.eng.ohio-state.edu (Rob Carriere)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c
Subject: Re: Just Wondering
Message-ID: <2025@quanta.eng.ohio-state.edu>
Date: 25 Apr 89 01:25:54 GMT
References: <2006@quanta.eng.ohio-state.edu> <12564@lanl.gov>
Sender: news@quanta.eng.ohio-state.edu
Reply-To: rob@raksha.eng.ohio-state.edu (Rob Carriere)
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Organization: Ohio State Univ, College of Engineering
Lines: 31

In article <12564@lanl.gov> jlg@lanl.gov (Jim Giles) writes:
>From article <2006@quanta.eng.ohio-state.edu>, by 
rob@raksha.eng.ohio-state.edu (Rob Carriere):
>> And from the other side of the bistable multivibrator, since there are
>> people who like this idea, since people who don't can just not use it,
>> and since C has a spirit of live and let live, why should it not be
>> case sensitive?  Is it hurting you?
>It hurts me in two ways:
>1)  My job often requires me to work-on, debug, or rewrite other people's
>    code.  If the other person distinguishes "myvar" from "myVar" and
>    several similar cases, this causes considerable heartburn.

This is not an argument, you might as well argue that your beloved
FORTRAN is at fault for letting people name their REALs a0, a1,
a2 etc in order of occurence, and INTEGERs i0, i1, etc.  Any
reasonable namespace can be abused by inappropriate choices.  Your
argument would work only if you could show that *all* case-sensitive
choices of variable names are bad, and we've already seen several
counterexamples to that.

>2)  Since C distinguishes case, I can't use it to help the readability
>    of code by EMPHASIZING parts that I consider important.

/* VVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVV */

    foo[37]->bar.baz += 3*pi/(2.05*e/c); /* this here be IMPORTANT! */

/* ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ */

SR
"I never mildly exaggerate."