There are two places where confusion could arise if you didn't have the case distinction in Haskell: pattern matching (does a name refer to a constructor or not) and type expressions (is it a type variable or not). In Haskell the distinction is made by case, but this is far from the only choice. There are other ways to mark what is a variable and what is not. I don't necessarily think that Haskell did it the best way, but then this is a minor syntactic issue. Changing the case of variables is a pretty low price to pay to solve this problem. -- Lennart On Aug 4, 2006, at 13:12 , Martin Percossi wrote:
Hi, I'm wondering what the rationale was for not allowing capitalized variable names (and uncapitalized type names and constructors). I can only think of two arguments, and IMHO both of them are bad:
1. Enforces a naming convention. Fine - but my view is that this doesn't belong in the language definition (it belongs in the user's coding standards). I get annoyed, for example, that when I write code that manipulates matrices and vectors, I can't refer to the matrices with capital letters as is common in the literature. And to anyone who says that it's good to enforce naming consistency, I have this to say: Any language that requires me to learn about category theory in order to write imperative code should treat me like an adult when it comes to the naming of variables as well. ;-)
2. It makes it easier to write the compiler. I don't think I need to explain why this is bad...
I imagine that someone is just itching to "sort me out". Do your worst! ;-)
Thx Martin _______________________________________________ Haskell-Cafe mailing list Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe