On Fri, Feb 20, 2009 at 08:25:39PM -0800, Arthur A. Gleckler wrote: > > Oh, THEM... well, good then. They don't come > > around here. There's nothing to worry about. > > Not so fast. My point was that Java is an example of what it's like > to have case sensitivity, and talking about code in Java requires > being specific about the case of every identifier.
This is a poor argument. Java code is that way not because the language is case sensitive, but because early-on the guardians of the language decreed that such use of case would be "preferred Java Style". (And they learned that from C++. I don't remember where C++ went off the rails. Early C++ code wasn't infested with camel-case, as far as I remember. Hmm. Smalltalk uses cammel case a lot. Maybe that's whre it came from?) C is also case sensitive, and the archetype for C is Kernighan and Ritchie's style, which almost never has that kind of distinction. There, the only style-inspired use of case is all-caps for #define macros (which is not universally applied, of course.) Similarly, Eiffel is a case sensitive language with lots of use of types in definitions, and its preferred style doesn't seem to lead to much in the way of grotesqueries (lower-case everywhere except for types, which are upper case.) > Marc's excellent proposal of a special syntax for case-sensitive > symbols solves the problem of interfacing with case-sensitive > languages without requiring that we give up the benefits of case > insensitivity for the vast majority of symbols that don't require > distinguishing case. There aren't any benefits of case insensitivity. Simplicity is a far more evident benefit of case sensitivity, IMO: A symbol is just what it is, no other combinations of characters match it. Cheers, Andrew. _______________________________________________ r6rs-discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.r6rs.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/r6rs-discuss
