Re: [Maxima] problem calling MAXIMA function at lisp level

Maple's use of upper case is, as I recall, somewhat mysterious
and linked with some conventions about "inert" functions. Distinguishing
Sum and sum  by  having the first of these be like Macsyma's noun.

I am neutral on the WordSeparator and word_separator debate.

Some options for lower-case vs no case are laid out in
http://www.franz.com/support/documentation/6.2/doc/pages/operators/excl/set-case-mode.htm
which has
     * :case-insensitive-upper
     * :case-insensitive-lower
     * :case-sensitive-lower

I think that maxima for the future should be compatible
with unicode.
RJF

willisb@unk.edu wrote:
> 
> One semester I kept a tally of the problems UNK students ran into using 
> Maple. I no longer have the tallies, but about
> 30% of them were due to case sensitivity,  30% were problems with 
> libraries that needed to be manually loaded,
> and 30% were mismatched parens.  (x)Maxima has partial solutions to each 
> of these problems.  I think it would
> be a mistake to allow mix both function name styles really_fast_factor 
>  and ReallyFastFactor in
> user-level Maxima code.
> 
> My vote is to keep Maxima case insensitive for the user.  I used to want 
> Maxima source code to be converted to
> all lower case; I'm not so sure now  -- now lower case mostly means bug 
> fixes or new code.
> 
> 
> Barton