You would need to lowercase (or uppercase) all calls to methods/functions/variables in a case-insensitive system.

That would be slower. Slower is bad.

first off not everyone uses an IDE with php, so yes the variables should be readable, but not overly long, because some people code by hand without any kind of intellisence and the longer the variable, the more of a chance there is to copy only a part or mistype the variable.

please lay off the “omg”, it could be considered insulting.

if $firstName or $first_name or $firstname is how you want to type it, then go ahead, however it should be the same throughout the code base.

i’m sure when php6 comes out, the Eclipse IDE plugin or whatever they are making in conjuction with Eclipse for the new zend framework will handle the case sensitivity issue.

besides if you coded consistenly in the first place, this wouldn’t be that big of an issue.

Any way you slice it, case-sensitivity is a matter of personal preference.

If it is a matter of personal preference then why should should anybody’s personal preferences be forced upon others?

Having case-sensitivity provides a more versatile language

How so? All I see is the potential to create confusing code where variables such as $account and $Account point to different things, and functions such as dostuff() and DoStuff() mean different things. If the IDE/compiler of the language can detect differences in case and automatically synchronise them to compensate then case-sensitivity becomes transparent, but PHP does not have this capability, so the potential for writing bad code is only increased by introducing case-sensitivity.

and the consistency IS important.

Introducing something “to be consistent” is a totally dumb idea if what you are perpetuating is a mechanism for creating confusing code.

Most RDBMS’ are built case-sensitive

Rubbish! I have never come across ay RDBMS which is case-sensitive! When you write an SQL query you can use any mixture of case for database names, table names, column names and function names. This makes them insensitive to case.

As for PHP 6, good riddance to the lot of the dropped “features”.

oh yeah if you’re making long variables like this …avariablelikethisisveryhardtounderstand….tisk tisk, bad example

How can this be a bad example? You should think first, then write. Just because a language is case insensitive doesn’t mean you can not use camelcaps (btw. I personally disagree with Tony’s statement that camelcaps are stupid, but that’s just a matter of preference, and if you know that Tony is in the business for so long it doesn’t come as a suprise that he favours _ over camelcaps).

Enforcing a language to be case sensitive JUST to ensure the code is readable is a very pathetic argument indeed, and don’t even get me started about the person who said it’s important for business (omg!!!)

While most of the time I disagree with Tony’s oppinion on a lot of matters, I have to agree with him on this one issue.

I would really like to know why the PHP dev’s are even considering this.

I’d rather like them to put all that energy into making sure UTF-8 will work flawless ;)

…register_globals, sessions, cookies, various Web-related enviroment values (e.g. $_SERVER) etc. For PHP to be a “fully-fledged” language it needs to be employable without them…

PHP was intentionally designed for use on the Web, that’s what’s unique about it. The fact that it streamlines such tasks as grabbing the query string key/value pairs is not a hindrance as a language. If we follow your prerequisites, then we should all just use Perl (a great language, btw).

…perhaps an extension-based GUI library etc…

Aren’t you referring to PHP-GTK?

however case sensitivity does has it uses for those of us who program a certain way and would like functions, methods and such to be typed consistently through out the code base. I think code consistency helps with readability and is extremely important as readability helps code to be somewhat self documenting.

i know that in c# i generally use hungarian notation for fields and and then Uppercase the first letter of properties. while this currently does not apply to php, it may in the future should they php group/ zend provide property accessors and perhaps do away with $ for fields/vars in the class scope.

however i sympathize if you want to be lazy and not worry about case sensitivity ;)

I think case-sensitivity is a good thing in PHP. While we could argue till we a black and blue about why case-sensitivity is a bad thing in computers, it is standard practice in programming languages and PHP needs it to keep desired consitency.

Introducing more case-sensitivity just to be consistent with other languages is a pathetic argument. Case sensitivity causes more problems than it solves, so it should be removed in the name of comon sense.

It will not be respected as a programming langauge and ultimately will decline in popularity

The millons of existing PHP programmers do NOT see the lack of case sensitivity as a problem, and those non-PHP programmers who refuse to touch it because of this are, quite frankly, people whom the PHP community would be better off without.

In a business sense it is important that PHP is case-senstive.

Absolute rubbish! People who use applications do not care whether the language it was written in is case sensitive or not. It is a matter only for programmers, not business users.