Why are many languages case sensitive?

Question

Why are many languages case sensitive?

Is it simply a matter of inheritance? C++ is case-sensitive because C is, Java is case-sensitive because C++ is, etc.? Or is t

Answer 1

There is another reason languages are case sensitive. IDs may be stored in a hash table and hash tables are dependent on hashing functions that will give different hashes for differing case. And it may not be convenient to convert all the IDs to all upper or all lower before running them through the hash function. I came across this issue when I was writing my own compiler. It was much simpler (lazier) to declare my language as case sensitive.