Posted by Colin Fine on 12/31/05 20:53

Tony Marston wrote:
> "Anonymous" <anonymous@nowhere.invalid> wrote in message
> news:43AE8ECF.54D24C7C@nowhere.invalid...
>
>>Tony Marston wrote:
>>
>>>Case-sensitivity is the whole point of this thread. Any language that has
>>>a
>>>feature which can be abused and which produces unmaintainable code is a
>>>BAD
>>>language. Any language that allows the same variable or function name to
>>
>>Then any language is bad by your definition.
>
>
> Any language that allows stupid mistakes is a bad language. That's why some
> programmers say that statically-typed and compiled languages are better that
> dynamically-typed interpretted languages.
>
>
>>That's not true. Anyone proficient in german can assure you that "Helft
>>den armen Vögeln." and "Helft den Armen vögeln." means something
>>*completely* different! ;-)
>
>
> Trust the bloody square-head sausage-eaters to throw a spanner in the works.
> But in ENGLISH, which is the universal language, there is no difference.
> Just check out any dictionary. Does it have separate entries in each case?
> No? I wonder why.....
>
>
Umm - I think you are putting a bit of a spanner in your own argument
here, Tony (witness the replies you got).

Yes, there are occasional cases where the case makes a difference, even
in English (consider 'reading', 'polish' and 'natal'). But in most
languages which use the Roman, Greek or Cyrillic alphabets the case is
hardly ever significant. German is a sort of exception because all nouns
are capitalised, but if I write VÖGELN you can't tell whether it's the
noun or the verb. And most other scripts don't have capitals (I think
Armenian does, and Georgian uses a sort of capital for titles).

But this looks like the "I can't counter this argument so I'll pick him
up on a triviality" defense from 'Anonymous'.

Colin

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