|
|
Posted by Tony Marston on 07/26/06 11:11
"Shelly" <sheldonlg.news@asap-consult.com> wrote in message
news:Bezxg.9948$vO.6518@newsread4.news.pas.earthlink.net...
>
> "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).
With PHP (and most other languages I've used in my 30-year career) you do
not have to use different case for variables and methods as they use other
methods. The fact that it has become the convention in a small number of
languages is no reason to force that convention on everybody.
--
Tony Marston
http://www.tonymarston.net
http://www.radicore.org
Navigation:
[Reply to this message]
|