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Re: Case



Lots of people write code for Maclisp and the Lisp machine in lower
case.  I do it a lot of the time.  On the other hand, sometimes I
feel like putting code in upper case.  I can't really decide which
I like better.  So I'm very glad that I can call the same functions
no matter which case I feel like using.

With single character names it is not very hard to remember which
of the two possibilities is desired.  But you shouldn't generalize
 from the example of "z" vs "Z".  With longer or compound names there
get to be more ways to choose from and it is harder to remember
which one is "right".

The place where most people run across this is in sending mail to
people on Multics.  Multics decided that it would be keen to
distinguish case in names of users, as in everything else.  The result
is that people constantly got the case wrong when sending mail there
and got their mail rejected.  Eventually Multics implemented a special
hack for ignoring case in the names of people who frequently got
net mail.