sasaki@harvard.ARPA (Marty Sasaki) (12/31/84)
In general, I find case sensitivity more of a bother than anything else.
Small typos can wreck havoc. You can also get into a lot of trouble
when porting a program from a system where the linker is case sensitive
to another where it is not.
I think that most will agree that the most important thing is whether
the programmer can clearly figure out what is going on. Readability of
the code, typographically, is very important.
There were several articles in "Software - Practice and Experience"
which discussed preferred methods of printing Pascal programs. I don't
remember exactly, but I think the results were that bold for reserved
words and italics for other identifiers was the easiest to read. I also
find that the Web output to TeX is easy to read.
Why aren't there more (any?) editors and pretty printers that deal with
keywords by using bold or underline rather than case? There aren't many
terminals that don't have some way of highlighting a letter, and
overstriking is simple with printers. Language sensitive editors could
easily scan the file being edited and highlight reserved words.
--
Marty Sasaki
Havard University Science Center
sasaki@harvard.{arpa,uucp}
617-495-1270