Masinter's modest proposal

[jkf at mit-vax at mit-xx]

  Due to hardware problems at Berkeley, we are days behind in receiving
arpanet mail.  Therefore some of these remarks may be dated:

  I fully support Masinter's proposal and I am a little surprised that others 
haven't criticized it.  As I see it, his proposal differs from mine in two
ways:
1) He wants the language to be case-sensitive always whereas I wanted a switch
   to allow it to be insensitive too.  The reason I suggested a switch
   was that I thought there were people out there who like to vary the
   capitalization of symbols: eg (DO ((x (CAR y) (CDR x))) () (PRINT x)).
   If people don't really care to have a case-insensitive mode, that is 
   fine with me.

2) He proposes that all public symbols be lower case.  This is really a style
   question and I favor such a proposal.  I think that it is important to
   be consistent in a language like lisp where there are so many symbols
   to remember.


					- John Foderaro