Case sensitivity (was Conjugate is weird)

>>>>> "CY" == C Y <smustudent1@yahoo.com> writes:

    CY> Um.  I guess I didn't express myself very well - anything written for
    CY> inclusion in Maxima would need to be written in such a way as to not
    CY> depend on case.  

If you have user-selectable case sensitivity, I don't see how you can
write code that doesn't depend on case.  My case-insensitive foo is
going to collide with your case-sensitive foo.  (Or is that FOO?)

    CY> We can also be smart about loading and saving:  if someone wants to
    CY> save a document, the document can automatically record whether it was
    CY> written in case sensitive or case non sensitive mode.  Then Maxima,
    CY> when loading that file, can compare what the file says about case to
    CY> what the user environment says about case, and autoconvert to lower
    CY> case if the file was written in case sensitive mode but the user is
    CY> running in case insensitive mode.  If someone has an older file that is
    CY> case sensitive, just add a toggle to the load command, i.e.:

    CY> load("filename", cs);

I'd rather not have to think about this at all.

    CY> if the command is given just as load("filename") without the toggle,
    CY> Maxima will check the file to see if the information is recorded there,
    CY> and if not assume the file matches the user's environment.  Perhaps it
    CY> could even scan for upper case letters in the case of running in case
    CY> insensitive mode.

I suppose that's possible to do, but the information MUST be in the
file.  It would be bad if maxima has to make assumptions.  I can see
it now---your carefully computed foo variable of 100 pages has just
been zapped because you loaded my virus package that sets foo to
%pi.  :-)

Personally, I think most people would be happy if maxima printed out
everything in lower case and wasn't case-sensitive.  But I'm
biased. :-)


Ray