case sensitivity

T. William Wells bill at twwells.uucp
Wed Apr 26 14:23:15 AEST 1989


In article <1320 at ns.network.com> ddb at ns.UUCP (David Dyer-Bennet) writes:
: Casing rules in English are generally formal, not substantive, and
: therefore I consider case to be essentially not significant in normal
: English usage.

	March vs. march?
	May vs. may?
	August vs. august?

	John vs. john?
	Mark vs. mark?

	French vs. french?
	German vs. german?

	House vs. house?
	Governor vs. governor?

And then consider German, where all nouns are capitalized.

But of course, this is all neither here nor there. Language is a just
a tool; we should shape the tool to meet our purposes, not some
arbitrary ideology. Deciding that C shouldn't have case sensitivity
because English doesn't is like deciding that one shouldn't split
infinitives in English because it can't be done in Latin.

(Sorry, I'm not up to constructing that last sentence with a split
infinitive that you won't even notice, much less cavil at. But did
you notice that the previous sentence ended in a preposition? Heresy!)

---
Bill                            { uunet | novavax } !twwells!bill



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