CompuServe Messages

"I don't hear/see you arguing that the system should require you to type them in uppercase to reference them…" And you won't either. But there's a distinction here. More: "… it doesn't matter how you spell it 'Close close cLose' whatever they all, in my humble opinion, should refer to the same thing." Hokay. To the first point: if the SYSTEM was requiring you to type them in all uppercase it would probably be converting them for you as well, like some of BASICs… it doesn't matter whether you typed upper or lower, all the keywords are getting converted to UPPER. What you are arguing about, I believe, is instead the system DISTINGUISHING between upper and lower case and requiring you "to type them in", not in uppercase, but THE WAY THEY ARE DEFINED. That is a subtle but significant difference, and one on which we disagree. I want full control over my variables, functions, and constants, and I don't want the compiler throwing away any information I give it. As to the second quote, I will give you an example. Suppose we write a file closing routine for a custom application. We want to be able to just close the file, or close and delete it, or close and delete it if there is a newer copy by the same name. So, we write a close function which we name, normally enough, "close(fp,mode)". For the modes we set up three defines: UPDATE to kill it if there's a newer version, DELETE if we want to delete after close, and CLOSE to simply close the file. So now you can make the following function call: "close(fptr,CLOSE)". I'm sure you can see the compiler becoming confused if it didn't care about case in this case. 8) Your point may be that a programmer should never use close and CLOSE in the same code, I don't know. Perhaps it's not as clear as it could be, and I imagine it could confuse some people. I should think it's obvious that close and CLOSE are two different entities, but since you're arguing that they SHOULDN'T be, maybe I'm all wet. If that's the case, we have a difference in programming style more than a disagreement over compiler design. It wasn't my intent to get into this discussion… I merely wanted to suggest some uses for upper/lower case. As far as language/compiler design is concerned, that's a very personal subject and depends on too many factors (including the programmer and program) for me to voice an opinion. Use what works for you.