From: Phillip Gawlowski <cmdjackryan@...>
Date: 2010-12-03T14:51:12+09:00
Subject: Re: newbie: variable names

2010/12/2 Jörg W Mittag <JoergWMittag+Ruby@googlemail.com>:
> Robert Klemme wrote:
>> On 12/02/2010 06:07 PM, Doug Stone wrote:
>>> why is it advantageous to be able to distinguish aVariableName from avariablename?
>> So you basically ask why Ruby's identifiers are case sensitive.  It's
>> that way in many (most?) programming languages.  I suspect that what to
>> us humans looks like simple (identifying both variants as the same
>> variable) is more difficult for computers: case handling is highly
>> dependent on the encoding used and may actually be difficult to compute.
>
> It's actually impossible. My favorite example:
>
>    def maße; end
>    def masse; end
>
>    MASSE  #  Oops. Which one do I mean?

This can get even worse if you have a font with an upper case ß (these exist):

MAßE # Er...


That's also a good example why Unicode is a good thing, but can be
painful when using Unicode characters to name programming constructs.

-- 
Phillip Gawlowski

Though the folk I have met,
(Ah, how soon!) they forget
When I've moved on to some other place,
There may be one or two,
When I've played and passed through,
Who'll remember my song or my face.