Lisp case (Re: [Maxima] Case sensitivity, line labels and the future)

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

    CY> AFAIK, the current situation is not strictly case insensitive, but is
    CY> governed by some rather strange rules.  Whatever else happens, we want
    CY> to come out of this with a uniform, consistent policy.

    CY> No, I know of no good reason for case insensitivity except some people
    CY> prefer working in an environment where they don't have to worry about
    CY> case.

Since no one has brought this up, I thought I would.

ANSI Common Lisp is "inherently" uppercase because when things are
read, they are converted to uppercase.  It's possible to change this,
but then you have to do weird things to the code, like putting |'s
around the symbols or having to explicitly put common-lisp functions
in upper-case while the rest is in lower case.

As a Lisp programmer none of these things appeal to me, and I
certainly have no desire to adjust the existing Lisp code to satisfy
this.

Allegro has a "modern" mode where Lisp is case-sensitive, but no other
Lisp that I know of has this.  (They were thoroughly flamed on
comp.lang.lisp for making that the default, and now the default is the
ANSI standard version.)

I suppose we could play games with Lisp packages so that maxima
functions and variables in certain Lisp packages would get treated
specially by maxima's input parser and display engine.

That would be a pain too.

Ray