Path: news.daimi.aau.dk!news.daimi.aau.dk!lynbech From: lynbech@xenon.daimi.aau.dk (Christian Lynbech) Newsgroups: comp.lang.beta Subject: Identifier case-sensitivity (was Re: Why can't we have ... ?) Date: 21 Sep 1994 12:42:42 GMT Organization: DAIMI, Computer Science Dept. of Aarhus Univ. Lines: 42 Message-ID: References: <35j8ki$3ld@engnews2.Eng.Sun.COM> NNTP-Posting-Host: xenon.daimi.aau.dk In-reply-to: kurt@Data-IO.COM's message of Tue, 20 Sep 1994 18:32:17 GMT >>>>> "Kurt" == Kurt Guntheroth writes: Kurt> In article wpp@marie.physik.tu-berlin.de Kurt> (Kai Petzke) writes: >>> aas@velociraptor.nr.no (Gisle Aas) writes: >> >>>> 15) Case sensitive identifiers. >> >>> I personally find case sensitive identifiers to be a nuisance, but >>> if most people prefer identifiers to be case sensitive, it is easy >>> to change the compiler! >> Make it an compiler option at least. Kurt> Case sensitive identifiers should not be a compiler option, Kurt> because it will lead to incompatible BETA programs. Kurt> A reason *not* to make variables case sensitive is if any of Kurt> them get mapped directly to filenames, because some filing Kurt> systems are not case sensitive. But others are. Wouldn't it be just as good a case for demanding case-sensitivity? Kurt> I have to say I like case sensitivity. Me too. While doeing pascal programming several years ago, I never could make myself feel secure about identifiers that looked different, even though the manual would assure me it was OK. Returning to filesystems, I would think that caseless filesystems must be on its way out (don't know much about VMS though). Even if DOS will live forever, there are so many other constraints and braindamage that having an identifier convention matching it, never will happen. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Christian Lynbech | Hit the philistines three times over the office: R0.33 (phone: 3217) | head with the Elisp reference manual. email: lynbech@daimi.aau.dk | - petonic@hal.com (Michael A. Petonic) ------------------------------------------------------------------------------