Re: upper and lower case

[George J. Carrette <GJC at MIT-MC>]

I think it comes down to readability and what people are used to around
here. First of all, the character set of Roman upper and lowercase
as we know it today wasn't exactly designed for maximum readability during
late night hacking. Also, people get used to being able to
use the dimensionality of case to make code pretty without having it
be a required part of the language. People use <space> and <tab> and <cr>
the same way, even though they are pretty much interchangable from the 
lisp readers point of view. 

The default recognization of names in our text editors (the Search commands)
are also case insensitive. I think this is related to the general
sloppiness in use of capitalization rules. The strongest argument
may be the following: lisp programmers "talk" about their programs,
they do not dwell on how they look on paper, they do not visualize
them in terms of characters. Spoken communication is much the same,
capitalization and case do not get past the footlights, although
good punctuation is very important.

The present situation is historical, and may change of course.

Maclisp on Multics is fullcase, although it can be changed to
translate case, PDP10 Maclisp, NIL and LispmLisp all have controllable
case translation.