[ac29]

As an admittedly amateur programmer, I think the reasoning is solid. Its difficult to read and understand code that does things like myvalue = myValue. I think they made the right tradeoff, in that value != Value (the case of the first letter is used), so if you really need to have to values with the same name, you can still do it.

As an aside, is there some reason that using the same identifier with different cases is desirable?

[jolmg]

> As an aside, is there some reason that using the same identifier with different cases is desirable?

It's not like that. The thing is that having case insensitive identifiers incentivices people to be inconsistent with their casing "because it doesn't matter" as one coworker that works in a case insensitive language said to me. "Whoops, I wrote 'vALUE'. Well, it doesn't matter; it works. :)" Thank god I don't have to touch that codebase. I do wonder on average how many different variations of casing is used for each variable and keyword.

[beagle3]

... It's like using curly braces to delimit scope incentivizes people to be inconsistent with indentation because "it doesn't matter".

Yes, there are always people who would do stupid stuff.

But we have decades of experience with Pascal, SQL, VB, VB.Net, Excel and variety of other languages. Decades. They each have their problems, but in wide practice, case [in]sensitivity is not one of them.

[jolmg]

Yet inconsistent indentation is a problem in wide practice. It doesn't take long to find popular open source projects that mix tabs and spaces in their indentation.

Of course, many people are going to be consistent with their casing even when using a case insensitive language, but it's nice to know that particular forms of bad style are never going to be an issue because particular rules of good style are enforced by the language.

[beagle3]

Inconsistent indentation is NOT a problem in practice.

inconsistent tab/space use is a problem in practice (not a "wide" one in my experience, but not negligible), but if you use the right tab width (and many projects mark it inside the files with a hint e.g. Emacs understands so that won't be an issue) - then it becomes a non problem too.

I've never heard of someone saying "I don't care about mixing spaces and tabs because it's the curly braces that matter", and I've never heard of someone who edits a file with inconsistent on-screen indentation and doesn't care.

[jolmg]

> Inconsistent indentation is NOT a problem in practice. inconsistent tab/space use is a problem in practice

Alright, I was talking about the latter, which causes the former when you're not evaluating file modelines.

> not a "wide" one in my experience

I have a ~/build directory that contains source files of 207 projects whose source I've downloaded over the years for various reasons. Of those 207, if I look for mixes of tabs and spaces in indentations using:

  for p in ~/build/{pkg,repo}/*; do
    grep -IPlr '^\s*( \t|\t )' $p/^.git | head -1
  done | wc -l

I get 144. You may consider the pattern `\t ` ok though because some people think it's cool to use tabs for indentation and spaces for alignment, but if I exclude those:

  for p in ~/build/{pkg,repo}/*; do
    grep -IPlr '^\s* \t' $p/^.git | head -1      
  done | wc -l

I still get 110. Now, those are just the ones that have a space and then a tab in one indentation. How about those that use a space as the first character in one indentation and then a tab as an adjacent line's first character in its indentation?

  for p in ~/build/{pkg,repo}/*; do
    ag -lr '^ .*\n\t|^\t.*\n |^\s* \t' $p/^.git | head -1 
  done | wc -l                       

That's 142.

If I run that last one only against pkg/, which contains mostly official package sources of my distro, then I get 69 matches out of 89 packages.

Note these are not file counts, but project counts with at least one such file.

You may view this as using a small sample size, but at least, the practice is pretty wide in my experience.

[jolmg]

I forgot to mention:

> but if you use the right tab width (and many projects mark it inside the files with a hint e.g. Emacs understands so that won't be an issue) - then it becomes a non problem too.

This isn't going to work when you're looking at a diff/patch, emailing an excerpt or otherwise looking at the code outside of a particular editor.

[m45t3r]

> As an aside, is there some reason that using the same identifier with different cases is desirable?

It is mostly for conventions, however different cases are generally used to represent different things. For example, in Python:

- ALL_CAPS: global variables

- PascalCase: for classes, and now that Python has typing annotations, types

- snake_case: everything else, from variables to function/method names

(This is not a rule, Python allows anything anywhere, so it is just a convention).

So for example, in Nim you couldn't have PERSON (global variable) and Person (class), however you could still have Person (class definition) and person (class instance). Of course, applying the code style from a language to another language is silly, however it is just to illustrate the value of case sensitive identifiers (if you think that my example is more or less valuable than having the flexibility of using a external library the way you want this is your choice).

BTW, nowadays I am studying Golang and I found it annoying that you capitalization is meaningful in Go, so person() is a private function however Person() is public. It is generally not bad, however sometimes I want to create a global private constant and can't simple call it MY_CONSTANT since this would make it public.

[Insanity]

You get used to the capitalisation. In python the _ prefix threw me off at first as well, but it just kind of grows on you I suppose.

[mehrdadn]

> Its difficult to read and understand code that does things like myvalue = myValue. I think they made the right tradeoff

They could enforce case consistency instead of case insensitivity if that's the problem they're trying to solve, though.

Although, even then, consider that variables like 'inform' and 'inForm' might not mean the same thing...

[gjm11]

Oh, but that's OK. You can just have inform and in_form.

Except you can't because Nim also ignores underscores in identifiers. Gotta make sure there is literally no way to disambiguate cases like this!

(I _want_ to like Nim but this single decision seems to me so spectacularly bad that it's a non-starter.)

[beagle3]

I was evangelizing and pushing Python in 1992 (Version 0.9.4) where I worked. The main objection everyone had to even trying ("so spectacularly bad it's a non starter" - think I've heard this wording exactly more than once): Indentation for scoping. I still had to fight that notion in 2010. but thankfully not any more.

Now, that does not mean Nim's underscore insensitivity is a good idea, but excuse me for saying "if that's a non starter for you to even trying, I have no respect for your opinion on programming language design". If you actually try and and dislike it, we might be able to discuss merits or opinions. "Ugly" it may be, it is in the eyes of the beholder. But "bad" - what's your metric?

[gjm11]

(Apologies for the greatly-delayed reply: I didn't notice your comment for ages.)

I'm not sure I understand your argument. It seems to go like this: "Years ago some people said one of Python's design choices was terrible, and it turned out to be fine. So if you think a language's design choice is terrible, then I have no respect for your opinion."

I don't see how that makes any sense. (I mean, obviously you are welcome not to respect my opinions! But I don't understand the reason you give.) Some possible language design choices are terrible, no? To take some extreme examples, we can probably agree that the choices made by INTERCAL, Brainfuck and Malbolge are (deliberately) terrible. So, you surely can't actually think that thinking a design decision is game-endingly bad, as such, means having un-respect-worthy opinions.

Maybe what you actually mean is: Deciding not even to try using a language because of one design feature you find terrible is evidence of incompetence, and therefore if I do that then my opinions shouldn't be respected. But, again, surely that's obviously wrong; I don't need to try programming in INTERCAL to know that it's not going to be a good use of my time (unless as a joke).

My best guess (which of course could be wrong, and I welcome corrections) is that you mean something like this: "It should be obvious that this design decision in Nim is no weirder or worse or more unreasonable than Python's decision to make whitespace significant. Lots of people thought that was obviously unacceptable, and with hindsight we can see that they were silly. Since this feature of Nim is no more unreasonable than that feature of Python, you're being silly too."

But I think it's incorrect to say that this design decision in Nim is no worse than significant whitespace in Python. Or to say that I've no more reason to think it bad than people exposed to Python early in its existence. (I also think those people weren't necessarily silly if they thought significant whitespace was a terrible idea, though I think they were wrong to think that. I would not discount someone's opinions on programming language design merely because I found they'd thought Python's significant whitespace was a bad idea when they first encountered it.)

Nim's variable-name rules have the following consequences.

1. Standard tooling will do the wrong thing with Nim names. If you want to search your Nim codebase using grep, or index its identifiers using ctags, or find the next instance of a given identifier in the file you're editing with your favourite text editor, then you're out of luck. (Unless your favourite text editor happens to have added special-case support for Nim. Some editors do have some Nim support; e.g., there are packages for Vim and Emacs that do this. But there are some very basic things they don't do -- e.g., I would like the * key in Vim or C-s in Emacs to be able to search for identifiers in my code, and it doesn't look to me as if this is something the available packages provide.) Consider also searching on the internet; do you want to bet on Google and other search engines learning to interpret things that might be Nim identifiers according to Nim's rules?

2. There are some (admittedly rare) distinctions that there's simply no way to make in Nim identifiers. As an example, someone upthread mentioned "inform" versus "in form". I wouldn't expect this sort of thing to matter often, but as a matter of principle it seems to me extremely poor taste to have a set of identifiers that simply can't represent arbitrary short English phrases unambiguously. (It's a bit like in old versions of C, where compilers and linkers weren't required to be able to distinguish anything more than the first 6 characters of each identifier, case-insensitively. You can always work around it, but having such a restriction there at all is a sign that someone hasn't thought things through.)

These are genuine limitations imposed by Nim's identifier-name rules. There are obvious easy-to-foresee ways in which they would lead to inconvenience and trouble when using Nim. Of course, it might turn out that the advantages (in, e.g., letting you use external libraries with a variety of stylistic conventions, while keeping a single style for your own code) outweigh the disadvantages, in which case I'll have made a mistake in not wanting to pursue Nim further for this reason. I'm comfortable with that; I have a finite amount of time and have to choose somehow what things are worth spending the time to learn well, and inevitably sometimes those decisions won't be optimal.

So far as I can see, there is (and was in 1992) no objection to semantically-significant whitespace in Python that is (or was) as cogent as this. There was "it's weird and unfamiliar" (which, in fact, I think can be a perfectly adequate reason not to put time into something; again, time and effort are limited and one has to prioritize somehow), and "it makes copying and pasting more error-prone sometimes" (which I think was never a strong objection for anyone using anything smarter than Notepad for editing, because you need to be able to fix up indentation whether you have block delimiters or not), and that's about it.

So, to me right now, it doesn't look as if the situations are parallel. Of course I might be wrong! Maybe back in 1992 there were objections to Python's whitespace rules that were just as apparently-cogent as the objections above to Nim's identifier-name rules are now, and I've just forgotten what they were or how plausible they seemed. But I don't think so.

(Pedantic note: Python doesn't use indentation for scoping. It uses indentation to delineate block structure, and some languages that are not Python use block structure for scoping. Python's blocks do not in general create their own scopes.)

[dom96]

You can also just pick a different name, which is something you should probably do anyway in this case.

[mehrdadn]

Sounds like you're agreeing with me?

[gjm11]

Yup. (And saying it's _even worse_ than what you describe.)

[SamReidHughes]

In many languages, you might use one for a type name, the other for a variable.

You could ban using the same identifier with different cases, instead of treating them the same.

[narimiran]

> In many languages, you might use one for a type name, the other for a variable.

And Nim is one of those languages too. This is perfectly valid and frequently used:

    type
      Person = object
        name: string
        age: int

    let person = Person(name: "you", age: 99)

    echo person

You can try it in Nim Playground: https://play.nim-lang.org/#ix=20jS

[blueprint]

On the other hand, what if it's a code UI limitation? Suppose the UI for writing Nim had support for linking, editing, viewing all such alternately spelled but equivalent symbols?

[SamReidHughes]

There are tools that aren't nim-specific, like ack/grep/sed/git, and code review tools, which suffer as a result.

[coldtea]

Then it limits me as a programmer to have to use said UI...

[bobbylarrybobby]

Nothing unusual in doing e.g. `array = Array()` (although you should probably give your variables better names than that), which would break in Nim.

[narimiran]

> `array = Array()` ...which would break in Nim.

This is NOT true.

The first character is case-sensitive in Nim, so examples like yours are not only possible, but frequently used even in Nim compiler and standard library.

[ac29]

Right, and that's the point, aside from the fact those 2 are actually different in nim. I see what you are doing there, but that would have been very confusing when I started programming.

Question is, should the language enforce you giving your variables a better name, or should convention? I think there are reasonable arguments for both.

[alpaca128]

But does a language with Python-like syntax really have to try to be so "beginner-friendly" that it enables inconsistent casing?

The language itself can't enforce better variable names, at least not this way - Nim doesn't stop me from using "abcd" or "a0, a1, ... a100" as variable names even though it's usually a very bad idea.

No, I think a language should help keeping the code consistent in the long term - and having this strange case insensitivity doesn't help there in my opinion.

[nimmer]

> I think a language should help keeping the code consistent in the long term - and having this strange case insensitivity doesn't help there in my opinion.

Not at all. Style insensitivity encourages good variable naming and there are both formatters and also the simple text completion in editors to guarantee consistency.

[CodeMage]

Another perfectly fine example:

  auto * logger = Logger::getLogger("main");

[narimiran]

...which also works perfectly fine in Nim.

[derriz]

But you’re not fully solving the problem of devs using inappropriate names and you make using popular tools like text editors, grep, ctags, etc more difficult to use effectively. I mean how do you stop devs picking easily confused pairs of identifiers like “xxxxxxxx” and “xxxxxxxx” for example?

Feels like a poor design decision to me based on cost/benefit of user ergonomics.

[enriquto]

> As an aside, is there some reason that using the same identifier with different cases is desirable?

I do it all the time, in numerical code. If you have two pairs of points, for example, it is very natural to name them "a,A,b,B"

[narimiran]

> for example, it is very natural to name them "a,A,b,B"

And just to clarify once again, since I'm not sure who will read which reply: those are NOT the same identifiers in Nim!

    let
      a = 11
      b = 22
      A = 99
      B = 88

    echo a == A # false
    echo b == B # false

Run the code in the Nim Playground if you don't believe: https://play.nim-lang.org/#ix=20kr

[enriquto]

great!

then I don't really understand nim's case insensitivity rules

[rafaelvasco]

Only the first char is case sensitive. The rest is case and underline insensitive;

[enriquto]

Oh, my god! How do people reach this kind of ideas?