Vote on Cases

[Scott E. Fahlman <Fahlman at Cmu-20c>]

I think that we are all sick to death of this case-sensitivity issue.
JKF, who brought the whole matter up, has asked us to make a decision,
and I guess it's time to do this.  I had hoped to have the poll of Franz
Lisp users as input before we got down to voting, but there seem to be
delays in getting this assembled.  In any event, I think we have all had
a chance to ask any nearby unix folks and/or mathematicians what they
think, we have heard all the arguments, and I think each of us has a
pretty clear opinion by now.

The live options seem to be:

1. Retain the case-insensitive status quo, along with a switch to print
symbols out in lower-case for users who like to see things that way.
More precisely, characters are by default converted to upper-case on
read-in, and then intern does observe case.

2. Add a switch to make the reader case-sensitive and, when in
case-insensitive mode, convert things to lower-case instead of
upper-case so that the case-sensitive folks don't have to type things in
in all-caps.

3. Make the system case-sensitive always, but require that all symbols
in white-pages or yellow-pages code be entirely in lower case.

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Speaking for the Spice Lisp, Vax/VMS Common Lisp, and Vax/Unix Common
Lisp implementation efforts, I vote for option 1.  I should also say
that only an overwhelming show of support by the other implementors for
option 2 or 3 is likely to budge us from this position.  I honestly do
not believe that a significant number of Unix people will stay away from
Common Lisp because of this.

-- Scott