Re: case sensitivity

[jm <janmar@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

>This is bad practice, though, as it's confusing and introduces 
>potential for errors. IMVHO, whatever  is decided, bad practice from 
>thirty-year-old programming languages is a problem for wrapper 
>generators rather than new programming languages.

this sounds like an argument for designing goo in a vacuum. however, 
I don't think we can ignore the computing landscape in which goo has
to operate. the fact is that a very large number of libraries are
written in c and some of them will use bad coding standards and
some of these will need to be wrapped. I consider wrapping a library
for use in goo as part of the 'goo experience' so weaknesses in
wrapper generators are weaknesses in goo.

anyway...

so how much work can be saved by making goo case sensitive?
to answer this we need to know which libraries are going to be wrapped
and then which of those actually have name conflicts: my guess is
there won't be many, but this could be based on false assumptions.

then we need to consider how much work it is to resolve name conflicts 
and document the changes: a perl script could automate most the work.

still, could this extra work be the difference between a library being
wrapped or not? after all, most good programmers are lazy, right?


now lets consider the benefits of case insensitivity.
robustness. useability. historical.
someone else will have to make the case for these, they sound
theoretical to me. I'd like to see an example of how it can be 
put to good use.
after a quick browse though the sources and sample code, it seems 
to me that most people are using the lisp standard of all lower case 
with '-' as word seperators.

--
 jan