cases, re: kmp's and moon's mail

[ucbvax:<Kim:jkf> (John Foderaro)]

    Let me once again ask that we not let our personal feelings about the
subject determine how Common Lisp should treat cases.

    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 know plenty of people who have no trouble remembering cases and can even
converse in a case-sensitive domain without any strain.  I haven't had a
chance to talk to most of you in person but I guess that you pronounce
'load-byte' as "load byte", not as "load hyphen byte".   How would you
pronounce 'loadbyte'?   The points are these:
 1) don't shackle others with your limitations
 2) The ability to imply a hyphen by just saying "load byte" is an example
    of how conventions are used to map a sequence of syllables into 
    a string of characters.  In another context the same people could use
    a convention whereby "load byte" meant "LoadByte".


Re:
    From: David A. Moon <Moon at SCRC-POINTER at MIT-MC>

    Masinter's "modest" proposal instead forces case-sensitivity on everyone,
    whether they like it or not.  There is the possibility of using two cases,
    however this is a fraud, because you are only allowed to use one case in
    portable programs.
    
	
I am not sure whether Moon's fingers slipped or if he really thinks that
Masinter's proposal refers to 'portable' programs.  In fact, Masinter's
proposal says that all 'public' programs must be in lower case:

   From: Masinter at PARC-MAXC
   b) All symbols in packages admitted into the Common Lisp white- and yellow-
      pages are REQUIRED to be lower case. 

Everyone wants their programs to be portable, so the set of portable
programs is (almost) equivalent to the set of all programs written in Common
Lisp.   However the set of all 'public' programs, that is those that are
documented in the white and yellow pages, will be a small subset of the set
of Common Lisp programs.   While Masinter's proposal requires the 'public'
programs to follow the convention of all lower case, it says nothing about
what my private programs have to look like.    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.


    I think that most people understand the arguments on both sides now and
I would like to see this resolved one way or the other.   Could the
implementors get together and come up with a policy decision?