[no subject]

[TK at MIT-MC]

Date: Fri, 03 Sep 1982 13:08:00 -0000

	From: ucbvax:<Kim:jkf> (John Foderaro)
	Subject: cases, re: kmp's and moon's mail

	Kent says that he has trouble remembering cases in words.  I can
	accept that but Kent should not generalize and say that this is try of
	all people.
I would have no trouble remembering any CONSISTENT set of conventions
for labelling word boundaries.  Common lisp, for better or worse, has chosen
to label word boundaries in symbol names with a hypen.  The function name
is load-byte, not loadbyte, not LoadByte, not Load_byte, not load!byte,
or anything else.  If there is ONE convention on how we separate words, then
talking about the separations is easy.  That's why you can discuss mixed
case without getting confused.  And why you can remember it.  If you used
a mixture of the above conventions, then you would find it impossible to
talk about mixed case, too.  We are really talking [partly] about what to use 
as the word delimiter, not about case at all.  Having one delimiter is much
better than having five.

	However, I write a piece of code which is useful enough to be added to
	the public code, then that code will be translated to lower case
	before being added.

This is exactly the point.  If case is distinguished, then this process
will be painful, bug-prone, and extra work for everyone.  The only alternative
is to avoid making symbols which are unique without case.  If you do that, then
the case being folded on input is not much of a burden, since the source code
can be as pretty [or ugly, your taste] as you want.
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