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Re: Apropos case sensitive?
re:
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From: Steve.Handerson@spice.cs.cmu.edu
Sorry if this has already been decided, but I've been using
lucid, which has a case-sensitive apropos, and think it's
*the wrong thing*.
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I think lucid is doing the right thing according to CLTL. CLTL says
"(apropos [italics]string) tries to find all available symbols
whose print name contains [italics]string as a substring."
Since we are dealing with strings, I take "substring" here to mean
case sensitive. For example (string= "FOO" "foo") => NIL. If this is
what CLTL says however (clarification please) then two points need to
made. (1.) There are other CL implementations that do a case
INSENSATIVE apropos. (2.) The traditional apropos did a case
INSENSATIVE comparison and I find this to be a generally more useful
one.
It would have been better (I think) if CLTL had specified EXACTLY that
if apropos was given a string as an argument it would do case
sensitive, and if given a symbol it would do case insensative.
Because, on an implementation that does a strictly speaking "case
sensitive apropos" then (apropos 'foo) should not print out the
function who's print name is "foo" since the print name of the symbol
'foo is "FOO".
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