Re: Camel case identifiers and folding

On 2019-03-15 17:09:49 -0600, Rob Sargent wrote:
> On Mar 15, 2019, at 4:43 PM, Morris de Oryx <morrisdeoryx(at)gmail(dot)com> wrote:
>
> The original question has already been answered really well, but it reminds
> me to mention that Postgres text/varchar values are case-sensitive. Here's
> a list of the times when I would like a case-sensitive text field:
>
> Never
>
> Now here's the list of times I would like a case-blind text field:
>
> Everywhere else.
>
[...]
> What sort of content is in your field of type text? Certainly, in English
> prose, “rob” is different than “Rob”

I disagree. While the grammar for written English has rules when to
write "rob" and when to write "Rob", that distinction usually carries no
semantic difference. Consider:

"How to Rob the Hump of a Camel"

"the go programming language was invented by rob pike, ken thompson and
robert griesemer"

Here "Rob" is a verb and "rob" is a first name, the opposite of what you
probably intended. Yet the the first sentence is grammatically correct
if it is a title and while the second isn't correct, few people will
have difficulties understanding it (many probably won't even notice that
it is all lower case).

Spoken English of course doesn't even have a case distinction.

> and if the content is for a web page (or in my experience, the content
> of medical reference books) these differences are critical.

A web page? Rarely, at least for the human readable parts. Medicine? I
don't know. There may be names for different substances which differ
only in case. But those are parts of a formal language, and as
programmers we already know about case-sensitive formal languages.

hp

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_ | Peter J. Holzer | we build much bigger, better disasters now
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