Just Wondering

[John Cowan]

In article <12481 at lanl.gov> jlg at lanl.gov (Jim Giles) writes:
>Ah, but do you intend to imply that "BecAUSe peopLE arE CaSE senSITive,
>as YOU CAn noW see" has a different _MEANING_ from "Because people are
>case sensitive, as you can now see?"  The fact is that most people are
>_NOT_ case sensitive with respect to the _MEANINGS_ of the words.  So,
>computer languages probably shouldn't let case effect the meaning either.


Well, sometimes.  DEC is a computer company, but "Dec" is an abbreviation
for December (credit: >Programming Pearls<); "Polish" and "polish" are
actually pronounced differently, as well as having different meanings
(credit: The Black Widowers);
"Billy" and "BillY" are probably distinct e-mail names.

NASA would look pretty odd as nasa, too.  My personal feeling, for what
it's worth, is that ALL UPPER CASE words should be distinct from all-lower-
case words and MiXeD-CaSE-wORDs.  In this scheme "foo" and "Foo" and "FoO"
mean "foo", but "FOO" means "FOO" and is distinct from the others.