[racket] true vs. True in BSL

On Fri, Nov 19, 2010 at 9:57 AM, Don Blaheta <dblaheta at monm.edu> wrote:
> A student of mine is having trouble keeping track of when to use capital
> vs lowercase letters---a common problem I've seen before, with any intro
> language---and in particular, keeps trying to write True and False
> instead of true and false.

My understanding is that convention is to capitalize at the beginning
of a sentence or when using a proper name.  Among the tech savvy,
using all capital letters is interpreted as shouting.  Lawyers seem to
think that extremely important sentences should be written in all
capital letters.

Unfortunately, it seems that many or most computer languages completely
ignore the existing common conventions.

> This isn't just a strange choice, it runs *precisely counter* to the
> *main stated goal* of the teaching languages, to exclude from the
> language anything that the students might accidentally type, that would
> be valid in the full language but was "not what they meant" and not
> something that they yet knew to avoid.

This argument appears to hold no weight with implementors of
case-sensitive languages.


-- 
~jrm