Summary of Survey Results:
Case Sensitivity

Introduction Read the Survey Questions Access Database of Responses

As noted elsewhere, probably just under 2000 computer science teachers received this survey request. Initially, about 30 responses were received. I sent out a second request to both mailing lists on August 7, 2001. As of August 17, 2001 I had received a total of 129 responses.

While this was not a scientific survey, the results are useful and some conclusions can be drawn.
129 total responses to the survey.

Here are the results by question:

Question 1: Are you a computer science teacher?

  • Yes - 124
  • No - 2
  • Other - 3

Note: While the majority of computer science teachers who subscribe to the list are teachers of Advanced Placement Computer Science, many of them teach other, non-AP courses as well, and some of the respondents to the survey do not teach any Advanced Placement courses. Many, if not most, of the respondents have experience in teaching beginning students.

Question 2: In your experience, have you found that cs students, especially beginners, have difficulty due to case-sensitive identifier names?

  • Yes - 21
  • No - 67
  • Some/little/initially - 38
  • No response - 2

When I wrote this question, I expected either a "yes" or a "no" response. However, quite a few respondents did not give such a black and white answer, but discussed the level difficulty their students had due to case-sensitivity, or indicated that their students had a small amount of trouble due to case-sensitivity initially, but it was of short duration and most students adapted easily. Therefore, when classifying the responses, I created another response category in which to put responses of some/little/initially. This did require a bit of judgement call on my part, but the complete responses are available for your perusal.

Overall, more than 80% of the teachers find this to be a relative non-issue, with students having little or no difficulty due to case-sensitivity.

Question 3: If you were designing a new programming language, would you choose to make it case-sensitive or case-insensitive? Why?

  • Case-sensitive - 69
  • Case-insensitive - 46
  • Other - 14

While most teachers considered the issue of case-sensitivity to be trivial or a non-issue, most of them responded that in designing a new language, they would choose to make it case-sensitive. It is possible, that because most of the teachers are teaching C++ and/or Java, that there is some bias towards that response in this particular sample of computer science teachers.

Also interesting, is that some teachers claimed that "human language is case-insenstive", therefore it would be more natural for a programming language to be case-insensitive, while others claimed that "human language is case-sensitive" and therefore it would be more natural for a programming language to be case-sensitive.

While the issue of case-sensitivity was of low importance for most teachers in this survey, it does seem that some students do have at least minor difficulty because of this issue. I have not seen any convincing argument in favor of designing a language to be case-sensitive. Some teachers talked about students learning attention to detail and careful programming habits, while others talked about the richness of the naming space. Overall, these were not very convincing arguments in favor of case-sensitivity.

Question 4: If you were using a language that had an option to set some sort of flag or compiler directive to turn case-sensitivity off, would you use such a feature with a beginning class?

  • Yes - 35
  • No - 83
  • Other - 8
  • No response - 3

Overwhelmingly, teachers felt that they would not use an option to temporarily turn case-sensitivity off. Many felt that this would be something that would later have to be "unlearned" or that it fostered bad-habits. The "other" responses comprised something like, "I would use it only in the advanced classes", or "I would use it in the beginning class but not in the advanced classes".

Question 5:When trying to select a programming language for instructing beginning students, do you consider case-sensitivity to be an important factor in selecting a language for your beginning programming course?

  • Yes - 4
  • No - 121
  • Other - 2
  • No response - 2

Teachers felt that there were many considerations that were much more important in choosing a programming language, other than case-sensitivity. Some said, that until this survey, they had never even though about it.

Any other comments? Respondents were asked if they had any other comments. These were so diverse in topic, that no attempt has been made to summarize them here. However, you can read all of the comments by browsing the database of responses.