[Laszlo-dev] org.openlaszlo.sc.CompilerError: class names only differ by upper/lower case: "Top" versus "top"

[Chuq Von Rospach]

On Aug 6, 2008, at 12:36 PM, P T Withington wrote:

> <flame>
> Is the bonehead who decided your file name must match your class any  
> relation to the bonehead who decided that line breaks had to be  
> represented by CR _and_ LF?
> </flame>
>

Sorry, if only I knew when I made that decision...

(okay, no, that wasn't me. Just wanted to see if I could get you to  
snort your pepsi up your nose...)

But seriously, it's one of those innocent-sounding decisions that come  
back to bite you. Unix and Unix-based filesystems were always case  
sensitive, so there was an assumption that all filesystems always will  
be. Not much you can do about it in retrospect -- other than maybe  
thinking about decisions being made today that seem innocent and  
wondering who's going to be calling you a bonehead in ten years...  
(grin). Like my motto in remodelling my house (or any program I open  
the hood on): I don't want whoever comes next to say about me what I'm  
saying about the person who's stuff I'm fixing...

> On 2008-08-06, at 15:10EDT, Donald Anderson wrote:
>
>> I don't think AS3 is the problem, the HFS+ file system is.
>> And even if you take global vars out of the picture,
>> you have the issue of someone that wants
>> both class foo and class Foo in the same program.


And to the serious point: Speaking as someone who's done a lot of  
maintenance programming in his life -- why in holy blazes would we  
even WANT to allow someone to throw a class foo and a class Foo (and a  
class fOo and a class fOO and....) in the same program without having  
the compiler slap them silly? Why is that even remotely a good idea,  
and so why are we considering creating hacks to make it possible?

If you ask me, this should be flagged as an error. Future programmers  
will thank you, not call you a bonehead....

I'm only mildly wishing that whoever made Javascript a camelhumping  
language AND felt it necessary to use things like getElementById have  
their armpits infested by camel fleas every time I end up typing  
getElementByID and have to go back and find it later...


--
Chuq Von Rospach
Webmaster, Laszlo Systems.
chuq at laszlosystems.com