Re: Breaking backwards compatibility - good or bad?

On Sun, 25 Dec 2005 11:02:47 -0000, "Tony Marston"
<tony@NOSPAM.demon.co.uk> wrote:

>I think not. Can you name me any computer language where the authors have
>deliberately created their own variable and function names in different
>mixtures of upper and lower case with a different meaning for each mixture?

C.

Typedefs and constants are almost always all upper-case and variables
and functions all lower-case. And they do commonly mix these two
things together. For C programmers, they always thing of all
upper-case variables as being in an entirely different namespace from
all-lowercase variables.

FILE* file.

>Why not? Because it would be confusing.

Apparently it's even less confusing, since the namespace/type of the
variable is known by it's case.

You know, I don't really care that much about the case-sensitivity
issue. I've programmed in PHP for years and hardly noticed the
different (case sensitive variables, case insensitive functions).
Neither one seemed to case more errors one way or the other. I can
also effortless move from VB to C++ and never have a problem with it
either.

I think you're making it a bigger issue than it is. If the PHP
developers want to change it for consistency sake, that seems to be a
good enough reason. It really won't affect anyone too much either
way.
Received on Tue Jan 3 03:47:50 2006