Just Wondering

David Dyer-Bennet ddb at ns.network.com
Tue Apr 25 07:16:45 AEST 1989


In article <17037 at mimsy.UUCP> chris at mimsy.UUCP (Chris Torek) writes:
:In article <13159 at dartvax.Dartmouth.EDU> jskuskin at eleazar.dartmouth.edu
:(Jeffrey Kuskin) writes:
:>A "I was just wondering" question:
:>
:>    Why is C case-sensitive?
:
:BecAUSe peopLE arE CaSE senSITive, as YOU CAn noW see.

It's not so clear to me (though that's certainly a cogent example).  I
recognize the word "It's" at the beginning of my first sentence as
just the same as the word "it's" in the middle of some sentence
somewhere without any problem (after 12 years or so of concentrated
training in school, that is).

I think people are pretty thoroughly trained to NOT be case sensitive
at the individual word level, and that your example is hard to read
because it violates our training to use casing as part of punctuation.
Making the rules of c casing in conflict with the rules of English
casing (which I percieve them to be) was probably a bad idea, unless
there are large benefits somewhere.  I've certainly seen a lot of
"casing" bugs.

-- 
David Dyer-Bennet, ddb at terrabit.fidonet.org, or ddb at ns.network.com
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