Posted by Mark A. Boyd on 08/09/06 02:33

The august Jerry Stuckle posted August:

> Tony Marston wrote:

[snip]

>> I have told you several times. When most people read a word it has the
>> same meaning regardless of case. To suddenly say that by simply
>> changing the case of one letter you prodce a totally different word is
>> confusing. Maintaining someone else's program where the same word is
>> used in multiple places, but because of small differences in case it
>> actually becomes a different word would be a nightmare to most people.
>
> Fine. Go teach English.

[snip]

And elsewhere today, Tony Marston wrote:

>> That's just your opinion. I still firmly believe that most programmers
>> would be confused if they encountered a word with the same spelling but
>> different case which actually meant something totally different. This is
>> not the case in any spoken language, nor is it the case most computer
>> languages. It is confusing, it leads to obfuscated and unmaintainable
>> code, therefore it is a bad thing. Period. End of story.

There you go again. Please don't teach English. You might put another bad
mark on our (U.S.) already poor educational system if you are expected to
mark a paper by a student named Mark. It may never dawn on you (even in
May) that Dawn wrote about Him not about him; that a lamp can help if
installing a LAMP at night; that not all dinnerware in China is china; that
a march need not be scheduled in March, etc., etc., etc.

Tony, if you can't easily see the differences in the words used in the
above paragraph - and understand that case changes their meaning to
something totally different - then I don't think you'll ever be comfortable
with case-sensitive programming languages. I *seriously* doubt that it
confuses most programmers when working with written or programming
languages. I didn't really think you had this trouble with the written
language either, but now that you've reiterated your problem and called it
the "End of story", I choose to believe you. Your inability to appreciate
the differences determines the "good" or "bad" of it for you and only you.

IMO obfuscated and unmaintainable code is written by programmers who are
just learning, don't care, in a mad rush, or are doing so intentionally. I
can't see where the case-sensitivity of a chosen programming language would
be the cause. After all, one should know whether the language supports it
or not.


--
Mark "Some day I'll post PHP questions/answers" Boyd
Keep-On-Learnin' :)

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