Subject: Case sensitivity (was Conjugate is weird)
From: Felix E. Klee
Date: Wed, 9 Apr 2003 19:23:12 +0200
On Wednesday 09 April 2003 16:33, Stavros Macrakis wrote:
> 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.
I can live with both, case sensitivity or case insensitivity. It might
probably be a good idea to make that issue consistent with LISP, if that's
possible.
As for the single character exceptions: that's absolutely repelling to me. I
agree with you and hope that such a scheme will not be implemented.
Felix