more on lower case

[Dave Touretzky at CMU-10A]

I wan't thinking of error messages when I sent my lower case suggestion.
I was thinking of s-expressions, and especially code.  I note that most
of the Lisp code written at MIT is in lower case, because ITS users have
EMACS.  If upper case is that winning, why don't they write all their Lisp
code that way?

We poor slobs who are forced to edit inside of Lisp and then write the
code out again have no choice about case.  I hate reading upper case
code.  As JoSH points out, the parentheses stand out much better in
lower case.  I don't know about VT52's, but most non-brain damaged
terminals have readable lower case fonts.

However, RWK has a point.  It would be bogus to store characters
internally in the inverted case from their external representation.  So
I guess I am suggesting that we make the default character
representation (internal and external) be lower case.  Rutgers LISP-20
does this, and so does the UNIX Franz Lisp.  I find both to be much more
readable than my upper case MacLisp code.

-- Dave Touretzky