Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!ncar!ico!ism780c!news
From: news@ism780c.isc.com (News system)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c
Subject: Re: Explanation of "Case-sensitive"
Message-ID: <26749@ism780c.isc.com>
Date: 26 Apr 89 23:44:45 GMT
References: <13174@dartvax.Dartmouth.EDU> <10296@ihlpb.ATT.COM>
Reply-To: marv@ism780.UUCP (Marvin Rubenstein)
Distribution: na
Organization: Interactive Systems Corp., Santa Monica CA
Lines: 33

In article <10296@ihlpb.ATT.COM> tainter@ihlpb.UUCP (55529-Tainter,J.A.) writes:
>Consider the fact that we capitalize the first letter of sentences (in English,
>sorry all you other native language speakers).  Why?  Because there is additional
>information important to the understanding of the statement which we wish to
>convey.  The same is true with programming languages.  I contend that "Why?"
>and "why?" are not the same.  The first is a quoted question, the latter is just
>a quoted question fragment.  That additional information is critical.  Just as
>the use of case in your programming should be.
>
>
>--johnathan.a.tainter--
>   att!ihlpb!tainter

Using English as a model for programming languages is fraught with problems.
As some one pointed out "Polish" and polish are not even pronounced the same
way.  But look at the sentence, "Polish the car with the polish in this
bottle.  Here both versions are pronounced the same but have different
meanings.  (Did you do a double take with "Polish", I did) Now look at, "He
asked me to read the code so I read it." In that sentence there are two
occurrences of the string "read".  Each occurrence has a different meaning
and a different pronunciation.

I think the case for case sensitivity (pun intended) should be made on the
bases of whether coding is less error prone one way or the other.  This could
be determined by experiment.  (My a prori guess: no difference)

Languages prior to C allowed only one case because that is all that was
available with the hardware.  C allowed two cases because by the time C was
developed ASCII devices were common.  Now we have equipment that supports
multiple fonts.  Should a future language make a distinction between italics
and boldface?  Between small and large character size?

    Marv Rubinstein