NetNews Usenet Archive 1992 #19/NN_1992_19.iso/spool/comp/edu/1341

Internet Message Format | 1992-09-03 | 1.8 KB

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From: [e-mail] (Bill Venables)
Newsgroups: comp.edu,comp.lang.fortran
Subject: Re: Small Language Wanted
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Date: 26 Aug 92 06:17:31 GMT
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In-reply-to: [e-mail]'s message of 25 Aug 92 10:42:11 GMT

>>>>> "Michal" == pawlak <[e-mail]> writes:

Michal> ... about 70% of the C code I had to work with was
Michal> badly written because of:
Michal> - ...
Michal> - making use of case sensitivity (i.e. symbols 'value' and 'Value' in the
Michal>   same program)
Michal> - ...

I'll accept all the other points, but NOT this one.  The concept of "case"
is a printing artefact and makes no sense in this context.  What's wrong
with using all 52 letters in the character set?  What could be more natural
than using "x" for a singly indexed array and "X" for a doubly indexed one?

Most versions of Fortran now do allow mixed case input (thank goodness -
otherwise you would go deaf reading the stuff) but then to regard "i" and
"I" as the *same* is a absolute gotcha.

It's case INsensitivity that is the real syntactic curse in any language
(or operating system for that matter).

--
___________________________________________________________________________
Bill Venables, Dept. of Statistics, | Email: [e-mail]
Univ. of Adelaide, South Australia. | Tel: [phone]  Fax: ...[phone]