At 01:07 AM 30-12-00 +1100, you wrote:

> > It makes life a WHOLE lot easier if you don't use
> > quoted identifiers at all.
>
>A curious comment Helen. I am sure a lot of work went into providing
>support for these capabilities and here you are suggesting that people
>not use them :-)
>
>Note: I realise that your text was posted to ensure Dion understood
>that quotes may be required. However I wanted to be sure any people
>new to IB/IBO understand that this is a subjective, not technical,
>opinion. So I thought I would offer my converse opinion.

I take Geoff's points about why *he* subjectively prefers quoted identifiers.
However, quoted identifiers were put there to solve problems people have
had transferring databases from systems that permit such things as blanks
in identifiers and using reserved words for identifiers.

I'll challenge the "subjective" notion, however. It is two extra
characters to type every time you refer to the object and you have to
remember to put them there. It enforces case-sensitivity (which I know in
Geoff's case is a non-issue because he's a C++ developer) and there are
some tools out there that would work **otherwise**, were it not for the
case-sensitivity requirement on quoted identifiers.

But what's most to the point technically is that it is an "extra" piece of
cargo that isn't needed if you faithfully follow the rules of good software
development practice, e.g. just because you CAN have three variables in the
same scope in C, fred, FRED and Fred doesn't mean you should...just because
you can put blanks in column names in some databases doesn't mean it's a
good idea...just because some databases let you have columns or tables
named STATE or TYPE doesn't mean you should. This is not subjective, it's
plain common sense.

My 0.545 cents US worth...

Helen

All for Open and Open for All
InterBase Developer Initiative · http://www.interbase2000.org
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