Case sensitivity, line labels and the future

--- Jay Belanger <belanger@truman.edu> wrote:
> 
> Martin RUBEY <rubey@labri.fr> writes:
> 
> > (2) Case sensitivity and line labels: I think that user's choice is
> a good
> > thing, and in my opinion there is a very simple way to achieve it:
> >
> > All contributed stuff must be case insensitive and must not use
> line 
> > labels in order to be accepted. In fact this is very easy to check:
> when 
> > receiving the source, demand that it's all in lower case...
> 
> I don't understand the point.  Why not just make the contributed
> stuff lower-case, why is case sensitivity an issue?
> Unless making the conversion from case-insensitive to case-sensitive
> is a large time sink, what is the problem with case sensitivity?

I think that's the point - it might be a significant time sink if the
code is very case sensitive.  
  
> What problems does it cause?  (I usually type foo, but occasionally
> I like to type Foo?)

Basically if we want to make use of case sensitive code but our
standard is to have all contributed code be lower case, we have to
rewrite it to use only lower case.  For example, if someone writes a
file that defines a function Diff which does something different from
diff, it's a problem when we convert to lower case.  My idea was
proposed to solve this problem, among other things, but the concensus
appears to be that it isn't workable. At this stage I have no idea what
we will do.  Maybe once we decide on a standard everyone will write to
it, but I suspect people working in a case sensitive environment will
want to user upper case, especially if they aren't "regular" developers
used to the way we operate.

The way things are shaping up, I think we will be either a)
autoconvering source files to lower case code and fixing what breaks or
b) going through each file one by one.  If we're going to do b it's a
good chance to add source level comments/docstrings.  I don't know if a
is even possible, since I don't know if we could properly test for
breakage.  XREF may wind up being of some use doing this.

CY

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