laurent@... wrote:

>    It is of infinitely less importance to
> decide whether I am an right or wrong about
> early FB than it is to decide whether fb2c
> should now profit from c's case
> sensitivity.  On that score, I still claim that
> FB *obvoiusly* should (optionally) allow case
> sensitivity wherever c does (for variables,
> constants, function names, ...). The ascii
> alphabetic characters are not so plentiful that
> we can afford to capriciously unsex them
> without seriously cramping the expressivity of
> our language. Numerous programmers have
> learned to exploit such sensitivity in other
> languages such as c, c++, Pascal, TeX,
> metapost, ... --- to mention a few in which
> I have enjoyed programming.

Interesting that you write 'c' and 'c++', which are not the names of  
languages.

I agree, for different reasons, that case-sensitivity is preferable.  
The mild discipline of learning not to type myVar in one place, and  
MyVaR elsewhere, conduces to writing code that is easy to read and  
understand.

FB 5.3 will not be case-sensitive, but introduces a relevant 'WYTIWYS  
feature' (What You Typed Is What You See). No longer will you be able  
to display frameRECT( MyrEcT ) as FRAMERECT( MYRECT ) or  
framerect( myrect )

> PS. Case sensitivity does not prevent IF from
> being equivalent to 'if'. Likewise for the
> classical BASIC 'keywords'.

Right, but such selective case-sensitivity would be much harder to  
implement.

Robert P.