• gramie@lemmy.ca
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    2 months ago

    I feel the same way about programming languages. There is no way that “User” and “user” should refer to different variables. How many times has that screwed people up, especially in a weekly typed language?

    One of the many things that I feel modern versions of Pascal got right.

    • Serinus@lemmy.world
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      2 months ago

      Nope. Completely different.

      Case is often used to distinguish scope. Lowercase is local while uppercase is public. “Name = name” is a pretty standard convention, especially in constructors.

      There is a ubiquitous use case in programming. There is not in the file system.

      • gramie@lemmy.ca
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        2 months ago

        My point is not about how case is meant to be used my point is that it is very easy to make a mistake that is difficult to spot. I think it makes a lot more sense to the case insensitive, and force different names to be used.

      • calcopiritus@lemmy.world
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        2 months ago

        This is the first time I’ve seen uppercase denoting scope. Usually it is done with a “_” or “__” prefix.

        Casing styles usually mean different identifier types.

        snake_case or pascalCase for functions and variables, CamelCase for types, UPPER_SNAKE_CASE for constants, and so on.

        If we want to apply this to file systems, you could argue something like: CamelCase for directories, snake_case for files, pascalCase for symlinks, UPPER_SNAKE_CASE for hidden files.