Case sensitivity (was Conjugate is weird)

On Monday 14 April 2003 21:01, C Y wrote:
> 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?

Well, what if a file was written in case sensitive mode and the user used 
"Foo" and "FOO" to mean different things (from my experience with case 
sensitive languages this does indeed happen, but "foo", of course, is a 
stupid example). Then downcasing will break things. And I find it 
absolutely confusing to have two modes. Just understanding what you wrote 
in your post took quite a while for me. 

As a Maxima newbie I have the following to say: Please decide on either case 
sensitivity or case insensitivity but not both! I personally prefer case 
sensitivity. After all, Maxima users (highschool students, etc. included) 
all have a certain kind of mathematical background and are trained to 
differentiate between symbols of different case. I don't think that they 
will have many problems with case sensitivity. They will, however, have 
problems when they want to use e.g. "e" for electron charge and "E" for 
energy but both refer to the same variable. People on this list have 
brought up that single letter exception to case sensitivity, but IMHO such 
uncommon conventions are confusing, especially to occasional Maxima users.

Now, about that idea to render characters in a front end. This might be 
fancy but not all users will want to use such an interface. And even when 
using e.g. imaxima in EMACS I don't want to enter "e_capital" to denote a 
capital "e". That way my expressions would get far too long. Note that I 
don't generally reject rendering of special characters. For examples I like 
to enter greek characters and see them rendered by imaxima. Maybe it would 
be a good idea to extend the TeX function to support more such characters 
and maybe constructs such as vectors.

Finally a word about that DWIM feature: Mathematica has a feature that 
points out possible spelling errors. While often this is annoying, it saved 
me several times from making stupid mistakes. If it can be turned of I 
welcome such a feature.

Felix

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