Scott Hanselman

We VB guys please innocent to this mess. It's those guys with the Unix/C/C++/Java/C# background that put case-sensitivity into all those places. (Tell me again why you want your application programming language to be case sensitive?)

Well, at least sanity reigned long enough to keep interfaces in the CLR case insensitive.

Billy

I realize that as a guy who's obviously not smart enough to code in C-style languages (well, maybe javascript), I'm not qualified to comment on this issue, but although I've asked a number of people who *are* smart enough to be C jockeys, I have yet to hear of a cogent explanation as to why case sensitivity is useful. I mean, sure, you can distinguish your mungeString() routine from that other MungeString() routine, and obviously your foo variable is quite different from your Foo variable. But that mostly sounds like bug farming to me. So, question: does case sensitivity result in more bugs and debugging time or less? Compared to, say, VB's case tolerance. (And I know that someone will -- because I've already seen this -- write something like "wHaT iF reGUlar SpeLLing waS casEInsenSitiVe?" and my comment is that that's different, bucko, because "Mike" and "mike" are not *completely different* entities, as are, say, "Mike" and "scott.")

I'm glad to see at least one developer speaking out on this issue rather than silently accepting the status quo. Case sensitivity is just wrong. Why keep perpetuating the mistakes of K&R?

Personally, I very much like and want case sensitivity. I equate it much to writing a document, a white paper or thesis. When writing, how you spell something and when you capitalize implies meaning. The same can be said for a coding standard. Camelcase for your variables. Proper case for your Properties...ad nauseum. It's a royal pain with vb that you cannot declare a variable such as streetName and then have a property called StreetName. Per the issue you described above (signOn!=signon)...a consistent use of constants and/or enumerated values can negate many/most of these problems.

My opinion anyway.
-Mathew Nolton