[r6rs-discuss] [Formal] Scheme should not be changed to be case sensitive.

From: Arthur A. Gleckler <arthur>
Date: Tue Nov 14 16:46:56 2006

On Nov 14, 2006, at 12:40 PM, Eli Barzilay wrote:

> In an attempt to make programs more robust, and supported by the
> Fooish academy, the FSCII (Fooish Standard Code for Information
> Exchange) encoding specifies that "pp" is the same as "p". Being
> a technologically influential nation, FSCII is adopted by the rest of
> the world. The R9RS is revised, and R10RS has an `apend' function
> that is used to append lists.

Hmm. This is certainly thought provoking. But FSCII hasn't been
adopted by the world; Unicode has. We can wait to deal with the
problem of FSCII until it arrives, perhaps in the R9RS or R10RS time
frame as you mentioned.

> See above. No personal attack intended.

Thanks. Sorry if I was testy.

> I am seriously arguing that
> other cultures can have different meanings that you are not aware of.

Yes, that's a good point. But I'll stick by my argument that someone
reading code written in human language HL will already have to know
the rules of case for HL, so case insensitivity won't be a problem at
all.

> There definitely enough Americans that I see who know how to read and
> write Hebrew, but in a very artifical/academic way.

Perhaps, but if they already know Hebrew, even if only in an
artificial/academic way, learning the case rules properly will be
easy and natural and not a big deal, and they'll know what to look
for. Case-insensitive Scheme will be helping them further their
knowledge of Hebrew!

> Hebrew will have the same problem with acronyms: a plain charater at
> the end of a word is usually a indication of an acronym. Usually
> there should be punctuation (a " character between the last two
> letters), but especially in code the meaning would be read
> differently.
>
> BTW, Hebrew does have final versions for some letters, but no capitals
> -- so you get to choose one of:
>
> * Make final and non-final characters be the same in all languages
> only if they have also upper and lower case forms.
>
> * Decide final and non final characters in Hebrew be the same even if
> it makes no sense at all. (In Hebrew.)
>
> Both choices look bad IMO.

Sorry, I don't know Hebrew, so I don't know what the right thing
would be. But aren't there rules in the Unicode standard that say
what to do here and in general for case?

Human languages are a beautiful and complicated thing, but I believe
that we're overestimating the complexity of this particular issue.
Received on Tue Nov 14 2006 - 16:46:37 UTC