Phil,

I too have been programming for more years than I care to admit, but I was at Brooklyn College beta testing UNIX when Kernighan and Ritchie were writing it at Bell Labs. In all my years, I too have never heard a rational argument for case-sensitivity being syntactically enforced. The only benefit that I can see for upper and lower case is stylistic. It does make reading variables easier, similar to the underscore, and for that I agree it makes sense.

If we could calculate the number of hours collectively spent debugging code over the years because of case-sensitivity issues, it would be hard to justify its continued usage.