On Sun, 27 Mar 2005 21:37:00 +0200, Alexander Gräf wrote:

>
>
>> -----Ursprüngliche Nachricht-----
>> Von: Fabricio Araujo [mailto:fabricioa@...]
>> Gesendet: Donnerstag, 24. Februar 2005 14:23
>> An: firebird-support@yahoogroups.com
>> Betreff: Re: AW: [firebird-support] Use of double quoted
>> names in Firebird
>>
>>
>> This is the kind of preciosism I hate. Case of identifiers is
>> a aesthetic choice of convenience.
>> And should stay that way.
>
>Kind of preciosism *you* hate. Different opinions.

Me and a lot of people. I'm not alone with this.
Preciosism is needed sometime, but this is not one of that
situations...

>> For me FirstName and Firstname is the same silly thing. The
>> only diff is aesthetic.
>> Aesthetic differences should not cause harm.
>>
>> Case is a *AESTHETIC* convenience. And the other things is
>> just exageration out of reality.
>> LastName carries the same data and meaning to the system as
>> Lastname, the difference is just you forgot the last N in a
>> spot inside 30 thousand lines of something.
>> Shoud the compiler would issue a error? Absolutely NOT, it's SILLY.
>> As the Surname = LastName question, although synonym, if you
>> use LastName so retain it. If you use Surname, use it to the
>> last line. And in *that* case the compiler must throw a error.
>>
>
>But whats the difference about the equallyness of "LastName" and "Lastname" vs. "SurName" and "LastName". They both mean the same, don't they? Why should the compiler only consider the first case beeing the same, but not the latter? The first difference is aesthetic, the second is how it is written, where's the difference?

<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<

"LastName" and "LastName" -=> Aesthetic (the compiler doesn't need to
know what it means to verify that's equal - just different lettercase)
"Surname" and "LastName" -=> Semantic (the compiler need to know what
it means to verify that equality).

Aesthetic differences must not disrupt any system. The system must
compile, link and execute as
planned even if I put a 'n' instead of a 'N' in a 30 thousand line
source code or in 30 thousand line set of stored procedures.

Semantic differences must throw a exception or warning because it can
indicate a logic error.

>
>
>> -------------->
>> >BTW: I would like to see the DB at least store the
>> identifiers exactly as I have written them, even if I wrote
>> them without quotes. That's only a cosmetic issue, I know,
>> but everybody will agree that FirstName does not look as
>> cluttered as FIRSTNAME. Using underscores is currently the
>> only option to make it a little bit more readable, and
>> readable code is - as we all know - a very important issue.
>> <---------------
>>
>> Finnaly, something useful... I agree with it.
>>
>
>At least. However, I doubt this will ever become reality. When I look into my nice DB-GUI, it all looks very ugly, like in a 8.3 MSDOS-filesystem. However, I personally write the creation scripts with correct case (LastName), but without quotes, and only refer to them in the correct case. The only pitfall is, that the compiler will let me refer to them in the wrong case without complaining about. However, I never had a problem remembering which case I had choosen for an identifier.
>

This would be nice... But there are more urgent things to be done with
FB.
One of those things would be cross-db queries... Which I dream for FB 5
or
(if we got lucky) FB 4.5... But it's just on the dreams thing for
now...