Oh, data is "right out" of this conversation. Data has to be treated that way. How else could Word offer a feature to not spell check capitalized words - it sees they are all caps and skips them because they are most likely acronyms. But, as you say, case-sensitivity in a programming language is mostly trouble for very, very little benefit. My theory as to why it came into being was that most of the early computer scientists were mathmeticians (actually, that is still true to a significant extent) and they were used to using capital Greek letters for one thing and the lower case version for another, so it probably seemed like a good idea to have the language behave that way. In practice, when most programs are not written by mathmeticians and most programs are written for business, it's just not too practical.
-----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Charlie Coleman Sent: Wednesday, September 27, 2006 3:05 PM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: RE: [NF] Python - Thinking Differently At 11:15 AM 9/27/2006 -0500, Stephen the Cook wrote: >Charlie Coleman <> wrote: > > > >> Unless you can see that userName is verified and UserName is > >> unverified because that is standard within your organization. ;) > > > > Nope. Bad, stupid, error-prone standards are to be changed, not followed. > > Why would even suggest such a thing? Oh.... MS-sheep... nevermind... > >Funny that you have to force that same concept when your dealing with VFP >data, John <> JOHN. Ah, but you missed the importance of something you just said. "... dealing with VFP data"... DATA!! You see, in the real world, the data we deal with does very often have case-sensitivity requirements. And there are esthetic values of viewing data with proper grammatical capitalization rules. And lets not forget the freakin' lawyer stuff - e.g. Legal Names of companies, blah blah blah, one mis-spelling there, including capitalization, can screw up contracts and other 'legal' things. So in the real world, the specific application and requirements will dictate how textual data should be compared (case or non-case sensitive). That is how it should be. But in the world of software source code, and I would say even OS file naming systems, case-sensitivity is ridiculous. There is esthetic value to seeing code and filenames with proper (well, pseudo-proper) grammatical capitalization. But in terms of actual functionality, the case of these things should not matter. I have a hunch that when the various compilers were initially created, the 'lazy' approach was taken (just look for whatever case it was written in). Or, the more optimistic view is they were worried about shaving off a few CPU cycles and didn't want to have to 'uppercase' comparisons to look things up in the symbol tables, etc. Ya know, I think it would be a very nice compiler enhancement (for any compiler) to set a flag to 'remove' case-sensitivity in the source code. I'll bet that 1 flag setting alone would allow shops to save tons of hours in debugging time. -Charlie [excessive quoting removed by server] _______________________________________________ Post Messages to: [email protected] Subscription Maintenance: http://leafe.com/mailman/listinfo/profox OT-free version of this list: http://leafe.com/mailman/listinfo/profoxtech ** All postings, unless explicitly stated otherwise, are the opinions of the author, and do not constitute legal or medical advice. This statement is added to the messages for those lawyers who are too stupid to see the obvious.
