On Nov 14, Per Bothner wrote:
> Arthur A.Gleckler wrote:
> > In <3.2. Lexical syntax>: Scheme should not be case sensitive.
> > After thirty years, what new argument came up to justify this
> > change?
>
> One is compatibility with XML: anyone who want to use Scheme symbols
> to represent XML element and attribute names will want
> case-sensitive names. (Of course mapping namespace-aware XML to
> Scheme symbols is trickier. One solution is to support some version
> of two-level names, as Common Lisp does. Kawa does a variant of
> this.)
>
> Another reason is is to bind to named "things" in case-sensitive
> languages. I.e. a "foreign function interface". For example I
> might want to call a method in Java, C#, or C++, all of which are
> case-sensitive.
Both of these points can be generalized as any kind of interactions
with the world outside of Scheme, where case sensitivity is far more
common.
Another argument is the mess that is unicode, with some exotic rules
for things like capitalization.
[And another (personal) argument is the bias of enforcing equality
between things that are different in Cultures Other Than Mine. IMO,
if case-insensitivity is the right choice, then ASCII would be
different.]
> > This means that years of tradition of writing quoted symbols in upper case
> > in macros for clarity will end
>
> I never heard of this tradition. Seems like a confusing convention.
I did hear about it. I agree that it's a confusing, and bad
practice. The single-bit dimension of capitals-or-lower is something
that is to restriced for practical use. For example, I've seen Lisp
code where capitals where used for definitions, so you get:
(defun FOO ...)
(foo ...)
> I for one strongly support case sensitive symbols.
+1
--
((lambda (x) (x x)) (lambda (x) (x x))) Eli Barzilay:
http://www.barzilay.org/ Maze is Life!
Received on Tue Nov 14 2006 - 14:08:39 UTC