CASE SENSITIVITY, REPLY TO COMMENTS

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

I am trying hard to follow JKF's suggestion that we not degenerate to a
lot of name-calling about case-sensitivity and all the other
brain-damage that Unix inflicts on its users, but such restraint is hard
to maintain given messages like the previous one from Michael Wahrman
(whoever he is).

To respond to JKF's earlier message:

It is probably true that the earlier decision about case sensitivity was
made with little input from the Franz/Unix people, who at the time were
not much interested in Common Lisp, so I suppose it is not entirely out
of order to reopen the issue.

I find JKF's proposed "compromise" incoherent.  For their own private
hacking, users can translate everything into EBCDIC, for all I care, but
what we are talking about here is a standard for portable Common Lisp
code.  I see no coherent way to let some users decide that "FOO" and
"Foo" are distinct symbols in their code and to have other users ignore
the difference.  It has to be uniformly one way or the other at the
interfaces.  Making the language case sensitive, in the sense that
the difference between "FOO" and "Foo" matters, is absolutely
unacceptable to me and, I think, to most of the other Common Lisp
implementors.

I think that what we are proposing is being misunderstood, at least by
some people out there.  We certainly are not requiring that Common Lisp
users ever type in things in upper case -- they can use any mixture of
case characters that they want.  If we add the proposed switch to PRINT,
then people never have to see upper-case on typeout.  The Unix people I
have talked to here at CMU are happy with that much: as long as they
don't have to read or write upper-case, then it is not important to them
to have "FOO" not eq to "Foo".  But if you folks really insist on true
case-sensitivity in portable code, then we've got a serious
disagreement.

-- Scott