Case sensitivity (was Conjugate is weird)

The Common Lisp default in the area of case sensitivity
is terrible, and was probably based on the uninformed world view
of people who were using old DEC PDP-10 computers, which were
(essentially) upper-case only.

I suggest that Maxima be case sensitive, just as Mathematica
is.  A spelling corrector can be written that suggests...
"There is no command Diff.  Would you like to use diff ?"
etc.

I like being able to use X,x, etc.

Editor tools can change stuff to lower case.  A student here
converted all maxima source to lower case as a part of a
larger (incomplete) project to make it multiple-user re-entrant.
RJF


Felix E. Klee wrote:
> 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
> 
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