Re: case sensitive readers

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

>   Jeff Dalton brought up the problem of the Lisp reader not being case
> sensitive.  His application was to read text in which case matters.
> I think that we would be better served in solving the global problem of
> a solely case insensitive reader, and once this is solved Jeff's problem
> disappears.

Actually, I was proposing a way to get a switchable, case-sensitive
reader.  I mentioned it's use for code and for reading list-structure
data.

However, I thought it will be very difficult to change the internal
case of Common Lisp to be lower case, so I didn't try to do that.  I'd
prefer lower case, I think it has been shown that lower case is easier
to read, I would find lower case easier to use, and I think it really
will be too late to change after we have a standard.  But I'm sure
many will argue that it's already too late now, and since I think
case-sensitivity has some value on its own, I didn't want to combine
it with something more controversial.

> As a user of Lisp on Unix-based workstations the fact that Common Lisp
> is not case-sensitive is a major annoyance.

I think it's worth pointing out that this isn't just a Unix issue.
Lower case has been used on other systems as well.

And in general Lisp seems to be moving towards lower case.  Most
textbooks seems to use lower case these days, and I've seen code
(such as the T sources) that's lower case now when it used to be
upper.