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Posted by Shelly on 07/26/06 01:06
"ImOk" <jon.macaroni@gmail.com> wrote in message
news:1153865032.072295.316090@h48g2000cwc.googlegroups.com...
>I just read a thread about this and I thought I would just add my
> 2cents why this situation exists.
>
> In the stone age days, keyboards did not have lowercase. So everything
> was typed in uppercase. No one bitched about it. Now with upper and
> lower case keyboards people bitch and curse. Including myself. But I
> live with it.
>
> The main reason why we have case sensitivity in programming languages
> goes back to the start of cave man days of language development:
> Compilation and interpretation performance. A compiler does not have to
> convert symbols to upper case or lower case or whatever. Also, only one
> way to have a symbol table in memory. This reasoning goes back to the
> days of slow CPU's and low memory. Today, one could argue otherwise.
>
> Same thing for many of the OSes of the world.
>
> So, they didn't force case sensitivity on us out of concern of the
> English language (Only Smalltalk cares about this in a serious manner).
> After all look at the crappy function names in maney languages
> including C and PHP.
>
> There are many things that we are stuck with for historical reasons
> that dont make sense today. But these days with autocompletion it
> shouldn't be much of an issue. Provided you are not using NoTePaD.
> Although I dislike VB for other reasons it does it it best. If you
> declare a variable, it will go through and fix it everywhere the same
> way. No questions asked.
>
> Ok, sorry about my rant.
>
I disagree. Look at Java. There is a definite set of conventions there
that readily identifies what kind of thing a name represents. For example,
theName is the name of a variable
TheName is the name of a class
THENAME is the name of a constant
I think that (a) the case sensitivity is useful and (b) it makes the code
easier to read (when doen properly).
Shelly
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