On Sun, 12 Sep 2004, Adriaan van Os wrote:
Frank Heckenbach wrote:
Which case-sensitive one? It's Pascal code, and Pacal is case-insensitive.
That may have been a wise design decision in the 1970's when programs were written on punch forms and then typed out by card punch operators. Anno 2004, it is an anachronism. I agree with Waldek that humans are case-sensitive - at least I am.
Regards,
Adriaan van Os
OK. Time to shoot off my keyboard...
IMHO, case-sensitivity is the single worst feature of both UNIX and C. In human language, capitalization is a grammatical construct which carries little or no semantic meaning (ie. the meaning of a word is almost never dependent on how it is capitalized). People will thus expect computer languages to work the same way. Given that this is the case, case-sensitive file systems and programming languages are guaranteed to confuse the unwary (and sometimes even the wary) without providing any discernable benefits other than a slightly simpler parser. It is one of the many reasons why C code is much more difficult to debug than Pascal or Fortran code.
Mind you, having a file system or programming language remember the capitalization of a word for display purposes can be useful for readibility, but to me, it makes no sense at all to permit two variable or file names with identical spellings, but different capitalizations.
Back to work...
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