naming conventions, was: Case sensitivity

   From: C Y <smustudent1 at yahoo>
   
   This is a very interesting point, and comes closest to convincing me we
   should go with strict case sensitivity.  I'm not quite sure how to
   think about this though - will we have to define a new command set for
   each language?  My best guess would be that translating all of Maxima's
   commands into another language is a highly nontrivial task - we aren't
   even aware of all that's in there in English.  Documentation and maybe
   things like menus can be handled this way, but I'm dubious as to how
   the command language itself could be made multilingual.

Indeed, my proposal did not imply that the set of builtin operators
and library functions should be internationalized.  That would be
extremely difficult, as you point out, and would give the community a
gift of continuing multilingual maintenance that would never end.

The standard set of Maxima operators must be expressed in Latin1.
This is exactly what Lisp does.  An I18N-capable Lisp allows the
programmer to create function and variable names (and comments) using
whatever characters he likes, but everyone happily uses car and cdr as
the standard functions to destructure cons cells.  The 7090/7094
hardware for which these names had direct meaning is no longer extant,
and even the equivalent names "first" and "rest" in Common Lisp are
very rarely used, as they suggest an interpretation about the cons
that is usually not appropriate.  Nearly no one would want to define
"premier" in French and "erste" in German, nor the zillions of
different words for "deriv[ative]".