Re: Camel case identifiers and folding - Mailing list pgsql-general

From Rob Sargent
Subject Re: Camel case identifiers and folding
Date
Msg-id 0536E5C1-A419-43B3-8083-19020439ABE7@gmail.com
Whole thread Raw
In response to Re: Camel case identifiers and folding  ("Peter J. Holzer" <hjp-pgsql@hjp.at>)
Responses Re: Camel case identifiers and folding  ("Peter J. Holzer" <hjp-pgsql@hjp.at>)
List pgsql-general


What sort of content is in your field of type text?  Certainly, in English
prose, “rob” is different than “Rob”

I disagree. While the grammar for written English has rules when to
write "rob" and when to write "Rob", that distinction usually carries no
semantic difference. Consider:

"How to Rob the Hump of a Camel"

"the go programming language was invented by rob pike, ken thompson and
robert griesemer"

Here "Rob" is a verb and "rob" is a first name, the opposite of what you
probably intended. Yet the the first sentence is grammatically correct
if it is a title and while the second isn't correct, few people will
have difficulties understanding it (many probably won't even notice that
it is all lower case).

Spoken English of course doesn't even have a case distinction.

and if the content is for a web page (or in my experience, the content
of medical reference books) these differences are critical.

A web page? Rarely, at least for the human readable parts. Medicine? I
don't know. There may be names for different substances which differ
only in case. But those are parts of a formal language, and as
programmers we already know about case-sensitive formal languages.

I don’t think it’s solely about the semantics.  One might be contractually obligated to always spell a name in some exact way including it capitalization. For instance if referring to "Rob Sargent” as a quote or accreditation, then it’s not okay to let a typo “rob Sargent” go through.

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