* It makes searching for identifiers harder. For Nim you can't even use case insensitive search because of the underscore thing! Better practice your regexes.
* The case insensitivity rules are usually super complicated and don't apply to everything, so now it's an extra thing you have to mentally compute when coding. This is probably the biggest problem and I'm sure it has led to bugs, e.g. in SQL.
* Do you enjoy the tabs vs spaces debate? How about single quote Vs double quotes? Ugly inconsistently styled code? Well you'll love this!
* Unicode case insensitivity is actually really really complicated (this mostly applies to filesystems).
You're basically opening yourself up to an array of annoyances and gotchas for essentially no benefits.
I've literally never seen anyone use two identifiers that only differ by case, but if that were actually a big problem it could be solved just by making that illegal. You don't have to resort to the insanity of case insensitivity.
Nim solved tabs/spaces debate by allowing only spaces. Single/double quote are also completely separate, so there is no inconsistency as well. About "inconsistently styled code" - due to style insensitivity, effects are not viral. If you depend on a library that uses `get_name` but your project adopted `getName()` your don't need to suffer.
> Unicode case insensitivity is actually really really complicated
Which is why nim only handles case insensitivity for ASCII identifiers and not Unicode. Which makes sense because 99.9% code is written in ASCII.
> The case insensitivity rules are usually super complicated and don't apply to everything
Quoting from the manual - "only the first letters are compared in a case-sensitive manner. Other letters are compared case-insensitively within the ASCII range, and underscores are ignored." Unicode is not handled in style-insensetive manner, so the rule is pretty simple.
> It makes searching for identifiers harder. For Nim you can't even use case insensitive search because of the underscore thing!
Technically true, but in reality this comes up so rarely, I didn't have any issues with this ever. Nim projects usually adopt camel/pascal case.
For some reason, people often assume that allowing style insensitivity instantly throws the whole language ecosystem in complete disarray and everyone starts writing code mixing every possible style of writing at once, swapping styles on every second identifier just for their amusement.
So it's only identifiers, what about keywords, compiler directives? And only ASCII characters... And it doesn't affect the first character randomly. Sure very simple.
> If you depend on a library that uses `get_name` but your project adopted `getName()` your don't need to suffer.
Yeah because nobody ever imports code from other projects, copy/pastes from StackOverflow etc. /s
> Nim projects usually adopt camel/pascal case.
So why do you need case insensitivity??!
Trust me this is a decision they will regret.
Not at all, unless you decide to mix different styles in the same codebase.
