What moron on this planet, or group of morons decided that case sensitivity in any language was a worthwhile thing to do.  What the hell is the point of it?

It seems all a bit pointless and time wasting, as far as I can tell allit does is:

• Make more variable names avaliable, but come on how many people do you know create variables with the same name except one letter in upper case, plus your never going to run out in real life are you
• It makes it look pretty, but so what

If im missing something please tell, case sensitivity just been stressing me out latetly with some other bits n bobs!

Case sensitivity can be a real pain in the arse sometimes. I spent far too much time a few weeks ago trying to track down where I screwed up in a client side script. Turns out I spelled the javascript split method 'Split', which broke the script. Just a silly little typo, but a world of aggravation.

It has to do with the machine level code that languages are converted to in order to execute. There's a wide range of issues involved, but a simplistic answer is...

The bit representation of upper and lower case letters is different - "c" physically sorts and compares differently from "C". In order to provide case insensitivity, a performance penalty is incurred by every machine level operation as the bit-level code has to be resolved for each instruction.

Compilers resolve these issues as part of the code compilation process by effectively converting all characters to one case. Scripting (asp, javascript, etc) and shell languages incurr the conversion penalty during run time. JavaScript came from the Unix world where performance rules.

KCWebMonkeys point is a good one. Option Explicit and Reverse Polish Notation are your friends.