Re: DEFAULT-CASE

[franz!frisky!jkf@ucbarpa.Berkeley.EDU (John Foderaro)]

 I'm not trying to start a religious war.  I'm not saying that
case-sensitive is better or worse than case-insensitive.   I'm just
saying that there are large numbers of people who favor each position
and that Common Lisp should support both.    

  Regarding internal vrs external:  The internal representation shows
through in a number of places.   For example the functions symbol-name
and make-symbol let the user deal with the actual internal
representation of the names of symbols.   The idea of having a
*print-case* value that inverts the case on output is interesting but 
that would make things awkward:  To make the symbol FooBar you 
would have to (make-symbol "fOObAR").   Also examining the characters
of a print-name with aref would give confusing results.  

>> I also claim that the choice of case in internal representation
>> is arbitrary and need not prejudice the external representation
>> at all.

 For a case-insensitive Lisp I completely agree.  For a case-sensitive
Lisp, as I've shown above, this just isn't true.   Thus if the needs
of the case-sensitive Lisp are met, then the needs of both are met.

 

-john foderaro


[it might be interesting to explore the possiblity of explicitly
stating that the internal representation of print-names was undefined
with respect to case, and further providing two new functions: one
which took a string and converted it to the internal representation
just as the reader would do and the other which took a symbol-name 
and converted it to a string just as the printer would do.  
I suspect that this would lead to programs that worked on a few
Common Lisps but failed on others due to accidental reliance on the
actual case of the printnames. ]