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POWhat's the advantage of case sensitive languages over case insensitive ones?
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copied!<p>I have been doing a number of projects in Delphi, which uses the case insensitive language Pascal, and I was wondering what the advantage of case sensitive languages is.<br> Jason <a href="https://stackoverflow.com/questions/309300/defend-php-convince-me-it-isnt-horrible">argues</a> that "Case insensitivity introduces much ambiguity". I don't agree. If you realize that the language is case insensitive you know that <code>WHILE</code> means the same thing as <code>while</code>, even if you never write the former. Same for variables and functions; camel casing is nice, but was the first letter also a capital or not? And what about functions whose name starts with an underscore? In case insensitive languages no problem: <code>_fooBar</code> will do just as nicely as <code>_FooBar</code>. So where's the ambiguity Jason refers to? Yes, you can write a variable in different ways, but the meaning is unambiguous! <code>FooBar</code> == <code>foobar</code>!</p> <p>In the same thread Delnan <a href="https://stackoverflow.com/questions/309300/defend-php-convince-me-it-isnt-horrible/3900114#3900114">says</a> that <code>Capitalization is the difference between "I had to help my uncle Jack off a horse.." and "I had to help my uncle jack off a horse.."</code>. Very clever :-). But rather a point against than pro case sensitivity: would you accept that your code goes haywire because of a single capitalization error? Again, in a case insensitive language, if <code>Jack</code> is a person, so is <code>jack</code>. </p> <p><strong>Question</strong>: is there anyone who uses this feature in case sensitive languages that you can define two different variables or functions just by different capitalization? Because that's the only advantage I can see in it. Sure, you'll say, I write the variable name with camel casing and the constant all uppercase. But IMO they're incompatible; <code>userName</code> as a variable makes sense, but <code>USERNAME</code> as a constant doesn't. </p> <p>(I realize that many programmers use case sensitive languages, so I'm prepared for a unwelcome reception :-))</p> <p><strong>edit</strong><br> The trigger for this question was Lynda.com's "ActionScript 3.0 in Flash CS3 Professional" training video, in which Todd Perkins spends half of his time emphasizing the capitalizations :-)</p>

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