Re: Issue: DEFPACKAGE (version 3)

[Jeff Dalton <jeff%aiai.edinburgh.ac.uk@NSS.Cs.Ucl.AC.UK>]

>   Date: Wed, 28 Sep 88 13:19:55 PDT
>   From: Jon L White <jonl@lucid.com>
>
>   I'd certainly be happy with that, but my impression is that moon and kmp
>   feel it is important to be able to use symbols just for their print-name;
>   the issue being that case-conversion happens automatically for symbols,
>   but doesn't for strings.
> 
> Just Moon thinks this.

I think so too.  I dislike being forced to use upper case;
I'd reather use :foo than "FOO".

Of course, if we were to change the internal case to lower (perhaps,
for backwards compatibility, using a canonical case trick like the
one suggested for pathnames), this problem would disappear for me,
though perhaps not for someone who was concerned about case conversion
per se (no matter what the internal case) rather than about upper
verses lower.

> (On the other hand, KMP programs about half the time in uppercase and
> half the time in lower case and has no particular phobia of seeing uppercase
> characters in a mostly lowercase program, so maybe he undervalues the
> importance to some people of never seeing an uppercase character anywhere
> in their code. :-)

Maybe the lower case on the machines you use isn't very readable, so
that upper case doesn't seem so bad. :-)

>   ... Note also that many users have discovered the wonderous insensitivity
>   to package problems that the notations :FOO and #:FOO have. ...
> 
> (Only half-serious, I think) Maybe we should permit only unpackaged symbols
> or symbols in the keyword package...

It's worth considering.