For those in the CASE discussion

[Orchard]

Wow. Went away for a week, and all hell broke loose. Anyways, as someone that programs for a living (in multiple case-sensitive languages), I'll throw in my 2 cents...

Absolutely everything in MT should be case insensitive. Period. Case sensitivity is feel-good crap that we all think we need, because that's what every other language does. It doesn't actually provide any tangible benefit at all.

More importantly, claiming that things should be case sensitive because that's how other language (C++, Java, VB, C#, whatever...) do it is (IMHO) fatally flawed in one major respect. If I'm writing code in any of those languages, I'm using an IDE (or at least VIM with a tags file). In that situation, I have the immense benefit of context-sensitive assistance that takes out all of the guesswork in remembering the exact naming of identifiers. Even if my IDE can't do that for me, and I know that I need a function or variable that has to do with "shirt color", I can do some kind of grep/find-in-files/regex to trawl through my code and scan for likely candidates.

Even if you're coding in a case-sensitive language, you're constantly using other tools and processes to help eliminate the handicap that the case sensitivity adds in the first place. Without ANY of those tools (certainly, none of the things I've described are possible in MT right now), removing case sensitivity levels the playing field a bit. It's one less fragment of information cluttering your head, as you won't be able to (easily) rely on your IDE and other tools to do it for you.

Oddly enough, even though I'm fully pointing out plenty of instances where case sensitivity occurs, I'm fully aware that it's not necessarily the best thing from a design standpoint. Again, I think many of us are arguing that we want the ability to make case sensitive string comparisons, but don't really want case-sensitive functions/variable names. For many of the reasons you are outlining.