Case-sensitivity: why -- or why not? (was Re: Damnation!)

[Neel Krishnaswami]

Paul Foley <mycroft at actrix.gen.nz> wrote:
> On 21 May 2000 18:39:07 GMT, Neel Krishnaswami wrote:
> 
> > Perhaps you should look at languages that are case-insensitive, and
> > see if people have the problems you suspect they might? Large bodies
> > of source code for Common Lisp, Scheme and Dylan are available under
> 
> Common Lisp is *not* case-insensitive.  The reader just upcases most
> symbols by default [...] 

Yes, this is certainly true.

> but you can easily change that if you want (e.g., make it downcase
> everything, leave the case as typed, or invert the case of
> non-mixed-case symbols) [ and you can quote characters (with
> backslash, or by surrounding them with vertical bars) to tell the
> reader to leave them alone.  |Foo|, |foo| and |FOO| are three
> totally independent things.

Sure, but people hardly ever do that; IME it's a lot more common to
leave the reader alone and use MAKE-SYMBOL to create non-upcased
symbols. So in practice -- which is all the comparison really needs --
people write CL code in lower or mixcase, without any problems.


Neel