[no subject]

[Kim.fateman at Berkeley]

As attested to by the common lisp manual itself, it seems lower case
code looks better;  anyone who deliberately writes code that
includes Foo and foo and FoO with the intention that those items
be the same should get his/her keyboard fixed;  there is a 1 line
UNIX command to map all these to (for example) lower case:

tr A-Z a-z <input > output.

It seems like a rather small burden to portability to insist that
functions be spelled the same way each time, just in case someone
reads a package in to a case-sensitive implementation.

But the point I wanted to make is rather different.  Sometimes
case is rather useful.  In mathematical notation, where most people
refer to items by single symbols (hence the use of Greek, Hebrew, and
rather arcane fonts), the absense of distinction between x, X,  and
to continue...  bold x, bold X, italic x, italic X,  .. would not
be considered seriously, I think.  The default in PDP-10 Macsyma
(upper-caseifies) is quite wrong, but there is a switch to change
it (bothcases:true$)