[no subject]

[KMP at MIT-MC (Kent M. Pitman)]

I disagree completely. I think that uppercase is much preferrable to
lowercase in places where you want not to worry about case. eg, it looks
like you forgot to upcase the first letter of your sentence if you do
things like:

	this is a sentence.  so is this.  mr. foo was here today.

whereas

	THIS IS A SENTENCE.  SO IS THIS.  MR. FOO WAS HERE TODAY.

looks perfectly fine. non-computer people are bothered by the lack of
capitalization at the beginning of textual sentences and in my observation,
are less bothered when it's something they can't see (ie, all uppercase). 

Secondly, since most people on upper/lower terminals tend to do input in
lower case, program output that has not dealt with case coming out in upper
is also a feature because it distinguishes prompting from input. eg,

	WHAT ANIMAL ARE YOU THINKING OF? I'm thinking of a dog.

If the default case is lower, then to achieve this end maybe you would
force the guy to type in upper case?

Thirdly, many people get themselves stuck with all-upper keyboards. As
obnoxious as it is that people continue to sell these things, we might as
well not go out just asking for trouble. I have found myself stuck, 
occasionally, on those losing things and was very glad that programs
had pity on them.

In the final analysis, if you care about case, you should specify it with
|...| or "..." and use PRINC instead of PRIN1 as you do now -- note how
neat it looks when I upcase those words in this text -- makes them stand
out -- gives a nice visual distinction between code and text doesn't it?

-kmp

ps if you want, i can send you instructions for how to mung up the lisp
 read syntax so that things will downcase instead ... but it hardly seems
 worth it.

pps I wouldn't object to mixed-case error messages -- which is what ejs is
 surely advocating (not only lower-case).

ppps This isn't a question of printers, it is a question of readers. let
 me know if you're confused on that issue.