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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.