Subject: Case sensitivity (was Conjugate is weird)
From: Stavros Macrakis
Date: Wed, 9 Apr 2003 10:33:33 -0400
I'll separate the answers by topic.
> I'm curious: do you plan to make Maxima 6.0 all case
> sensitive or all case insensitive?
I'm not working on that area, but when we discussed this a while ago, I
believe the conclusion was that Maxima should be case-insensitive, but
*preserve* case. That is, if you first type in a symbol as NewVar, then
if later you use NEWVAR or newvar or nEwVaR, they are all canonicalized
as NewVar. The only hesitation I have about this policy is for
single-letter variables, where mathematical notation has traditionally
distinguished between a and A. But an exception like that would
immediately confuse matters, and a simple convention such as a vs. Ac (A
capital) would probably be better.