I started programming with Modula-2 and I really believe it was case sensitive. In fact I remember the book I used to learn it (Ogilvie) mentioning the case sensitiveness as a peculiarity of the language: "if case matters in natural languages, why programming languages should ignore it"

It is, as do all C derived languages.

After Pascal, all languages that Niklaus Wirth created were case sensitive.

Uppercase keywords are debatable as a style, however with good IDE tooling hardly an issue.

Similarly to BASIC and SQL, or spaces in ML languages and Python, don't use Notepad like editors for them, use something with autoformatter.

Pity that in Modula-2 case those products are long gone, and I doubt many would bother with a VSCode extension or something.

There is a VSCode extension for syntax highlighting in Modula-2: https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=redstar....

Yes, I guess it could be a starting point for automatic formating as well.

A proper example is probably "an apple is red" and "red is an apple".

What you’re missing that is “red is an apple” is also possibly saying in a metaphorical sense that red is like an apple to someone - delicious, a treat, perhaps otherwise representative. In that way, the encoding of “is”’ is exactly correct - it’s an ordered pair of glyphs that imply a weak form of assignment or description. : apologies, replied to the wrong post, meant to push this up one.

The correct sentence would start with a capital letter: “Red is an apple.” This is also completely valid as in a cartoon character of an apple named Red. The subject being the start of the sentence compounds the uncertainty in meaning.

Yes, this is because there's no assignment happening up front w.r.t. the word 'red'. However, you'll notice the same kind of ambiguity for the word 'apple' in the reversed sentence, as the word 'The' can imply quite a few things following it.

The entropy gotta get slung around somehow.

Yes, I agree, I feel the term "code" potentially misleading. But even "programming" can look as a triviality when presented in schools with no context and simplistic exercises. https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/3571785.3574125

Yes, I have similar concerns. These models regurgitate previously seen strings, previous benchmarks included. When you try to evaluate their sheer ability to reason on the text, however, they perform poorly. (Our experiments with GPT-3 are here: https://doi.org/10.5220/0012007500003470)

This ITiCSE working group tried to clarify why we should be interested in programming (not coding) in education: What We Talk About When We Talk About Programs https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3571785.3574125 (open access)

The current focus on "coding skills" in schools poses the risk of giving students an overly simplistic and impoverished idea of what programming means and involves. Let's try to change it!

I would add foot to the list: https://github.com/DanteAlighierin/foot

And you can use it with a standard OTP generator: https://github.com/andry08/ArubaOTP-seed-extractor

Omg this is awesome, thank you

Two years ago I used MENACE to introduce students to machine learning approaches: it was the final example in course of programming for lawyers.

https://pypi.org/project/lex-game/

The code uses excel files instead of matchboxes... It was in fact an example intended to explore further the use of some libraries for office automation. It also allowed for easy seeing of the weights for different choices, still in a structured way even if outside the program itself.

By Alan Perlis