Here is the original
survey questionaire, as posted to the AP Computer Science Teachers Mailing
List. If you don't want to read the whole introduction, you may skip
straight to the questions.
To: "AP Computer Science Teachers" <apcsteachers@kserver.org>
Subject: [apcs] Language Design: Case sensitivity
From: Sheila King <sheila@thinkspot.net>
Date: Fri, 20 Jul 2001 15:22:00 -0700
This is a bit off-topic, so please feel free to reply off-list...
As some of you have probably noticed (or maybe not), I've become quite a
fan of the Python programming language, lately. I follow the newsgroup
comp.lang.python. Python is a language which is under development.
One of the recent language changes recently discussed in
comp.lang.python has to do with whether identifiers should or should not
be case-sensitive.
Those of us who programmed in Pascal, certainly recall the
case-insensitivity of that programming language. And now that we are
programming in C++, and moving to Java in another couple of years, we
are programming in a case-sensitive language. Python is currently a
case-sensitive language.
I would like to conduct a small survey on the issue of case-sensitivity
in identifier names...
When answering these questions, please do not consider only AP level
programming students, who are usually very sharp and often have
programming experience, but please think of beginning programming
students, and particularly those students who are not especially adept
at programming.
Reply to: case@thinkspot.net if you please, and I will compile all the
results, summarize them and report back to the list on the findings.
1. Are you a computer science teacher?
2. In your experience, have you found that cs students, especially
beginners, have difficulty due to case-sensitive identifier names?
3. If you were designing a new programming language, would you choose to
make it case-sensitive or case-insensitive? Why?
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?
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?
Any other comments?
--
Sheila King
http://www.thinkspot.net/sheila/
http://www.k12groups.org/
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