SETF, case, etc.

[Earl A. Killian <Killian at MIT-MULTICS>]

The manual still seems obviously incomplete to me (just look at the
compiler and evaluator chapters), and so I assume there will still be at
least one more meeting, etc. and so some of these ideas are still worth
bringing up.  If that is not the case, then someone should say so.

However, I agree with you on the subject of case sensitivity.  There
were many serious attempts to find a way to preserve case that failed.
Not uppercasing on READ should be easy enough as is so that a special
option shouldn't be necessary, though I'm at a loss as to how to do it
from the description in the current manual (I hope this is a failure in
the documentation and not the language).  Doing this would let you write
code as in

(SETQ MultiWordVarName NIL)

as many Interlisp users do all the time (though possible in Maclisp, it
never caught on).  This is probably not quite what the lowercasers want,
but given the strong feelings of uppercasers, I don't see how any more
can be done.  An option to print in lowercase seems pretty reasonable.

Also, for passing things to the os, which someone was worrying about, I
expect that people will use strings, which are not touched, case-wise.


P.S. to GLS: the manual mentions nonterminating macro chars several
times, but doesn't really say what their real semantics are.  This needs
to be fixed.