Re: Breaking backwards compatibility - good or bad?

Tony Marston wrote:

>>>
>>
>>I'm not going to bite on that one any more. Several people have tried to
>>tell you. Go back through this thread. I'm not going to repeat their
>>arguments.
>
>
> Their arguments don't hold water. Saying that "it is this way becauseit's
> always been this way" is not an argument.
>
>
>>The one exception I will make - when computers can understand verbal
>>instructions (or even written instructions) like people do, then you can
>>compare computer and human languages. Until then, you are talking apples
>>and oranges.
>
>
> Humans communicate with other humans using human language. Humans
> communicate with computers using a computer language, one that translates
> high-level commands into low-level machine instructions. Human and computer
> languages thereore have a single point of origin, and to say that they are
> like apples and oranges just shows the depth of your ignorance.
>
> The first computer languages were case-insensitive, just like human
> languages. Then some UTTER MORON decided to break with a tradition that had
> existed since human language first appeared in written form and insisted
> that the SAME word in a DIFFERENT case now has a DIFFERENT meaning. The
> reason for this was probaby because he was too stupid or too lazy to perform
> case-insensitive searches of variable and function names.
>
Again you are allowing hyperbole (and vituperation) to pollute your
argument. Case goes back not much more than a thousand years, and is
only found in scripts developed in Europe.
Your point nevertheless stands, since the people in question were
English speakers.
And I suspect that a major driver for case sensitivity in Unix was a
demand for short options on the command line, so they chose to make '-b'
and '-B' different in that context, and extended it to everywhere else.

Colin
Received on Tue Jan 3 03:51:09 2006