Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Posting-Version: version B 2.10.2 9/17/84; site opus.UUCP Path: utzoo!watmath!clyde!burl!ulysses!allegra!mit-eddie!godot!harvard!seismo!hao!cires!nbires!opus!rcd From: rcd@opus.UUCP (Dick Dunn) Newsgroups: net.lang Subject: Re: Alternative Structures Message-ID: <983@opus.UUCP> Date: Tue, 18-Dec-84 23:08:12 EST Article-I.D.: opus.983 Posted: Tue Dec 18 23:08:12 1984 Date-Received: Thu, 20-Dec-84 05:19:59 EST References: <8900018@uiucdcsb.UUCP> <18218@lanl.ARPA> Organization: NBI,Inc, Boulder CO Lines: 24 > > Is there any reason that case can not be used to contain semantic > > information? > > There is no reason other than general inconvenience... > ... > The thing is, it's not really necessary for case to be distinguished, and > it can make code unreadable if it is adopted. It might be worth an experiment in a toy language. There are various case conventions that I have encountered which I find difficult to read, such as the MixedCaseStyle. Some folks like that one; my objection is that I find it visually jarring--I'm not used to seeing words with isolated case shifts within. HOWEVER, there's material for experimentation. Natural language has a lot of redundancy in it and programming languages have comparatively little. In natural language, we ignore some case distinctions such as the capitalization of the first word of a sentence but regard others (such as all-caps, usually indicating an acronym these days) as significant. (Gee, maybe we could capitalize the first letter of the first word of a statement, to give some redundancy over the semicolon terminator:-) -- Dick Dunn {hao,ucbvax,allegra}!nbires!rcd (303)444-5710 x3086 ...Nothing left to do but smile, smile, smile.