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Capitalization of proper nouns is a core semantic feature of English. While I'm sure you'll be tempted to hand-wave it away as a special case (see what I did th
by ghostly_s 8y ago
Capitalization of proper nouns is a core semantic feature of English. While I'm sure you'll be tempted to hand-wave it away as a special case (see what I did there) of case-sensitivity, it nonetheless refutes your argument.
- Pxtl 8y agoThe problem comes primarily from systems that allow identifiers (or other semantically meaningful concepts like format strings) to differ only by case. This could be considered a side-quest of the naive implementation of case-sensitivity. "Case-sensitive but identifiers cannot differ only by case" would be a reasonable compromise. "Martin" and "martin" are obviously not different names. Martin may be more correct, but allowing "martin" as a separate name is worse.
- anticensor 8y ago> Capitalization of proper nouns is a core semantic feature of English. It is a core spelling rule of English. They could have gone the German way, with all nouns capitalised and compound words without spaces.
- acdha 8y agoNo, as you'd learn if you tried to find counter-examples for the cases I mentioned. Computer systems commonly treat terms which differ only in case as separate values but humans almost always try to do the opposite. People have preferences for proper usage but that's quite different from treating alternate case values as separate because people try to recognize the intention even if it's poorly expressed.