Subject: Case sensitivity (was Conjugate is weird)
From: C Y
Date: Mon, 14 Apr 2003 12:01:40 -0700 (PDT)
--- Raymond Toy <toy@rtp.ericsson.se> wrote:
> >>>>> "CY" == C Y <smustudent1@yahoo.com> writes:
>
> CY> My thought is this would just confuse the user. I vote we
> allow only
> CY> two modes - either fully case sensitive or fully case
> insensitive, and
> CY> allow the user to decide at session level. Maxima code
> itself would be
> CY> written in lower case in every possible instance.
>
> I think allowing the user to set the mode is very bad. Choose one or
> the other but don't let it be changeable. You'll get things where
> this person contributes something in that case mode, but you use the
> other case mode and things break in weird ways.
>
> I would fight for case sensitive maxima (ick!) long before I would
> fight for a user-selectable case sensitivity mode.
>
> Ray
Um. I guess I didn't express myself very well - anything written for
inclusion in Maxima would need to be written in such a way as to not
depend on case.
We can also be smart about loading and saving: if someone wants to
save a document, the document can automatically record whether it was
written in case sensitive or case non sensitive mode. Then Maxima,
when loading that file, can compare what the file says about case to
what the user environment says about case, and autoconvert to lower
case if the file was written in case sensitive mode but the user is
running in case insensitive mode. If someone has an older file that is
case sensitive, just add a toggle to the load command, i.e.:
load("filename", cs);
if the command is given just as load("filename") without the toggle,
Maxima will check the file to see if the information is recorded there,
and if not assume the file matches the user's environment. Perhaps it
could even scan for upper case letters in the case of running in case
insensitive mode.
It just seems to me that we don't need to confine people to one style,
especially given a lot of people have strong feelings about this
particular issue. Case conversion can be well defined - people can
write in whatever style they choose and Maxima can easily convert it
transparently, unless I'm missing something. I could be wrong, of
course, but I'm not seeing the problem. Can someone point out what I'm missing?
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