On 12/02/2010 06:07 PM, Doug Stone wrote:

> why is it advantageous to be able to distinguish aVariableName from avariablename?

So you basically ask why Ruby's identifiers are case sensitive.  It's 
that way in many (most?) programming languages.  I suspect that what to 
us humans looks like simple (identifying both variants as the same 
variable) is more difficult for computers: case handling is highly 
dependent on the encoding used and may actually be difficult to compute. 
  For a machine it is easier to just test for binary identity.

Good news is: you can actually get used to this. :-)

Kind regards

	robert