Subject: Case sensitivity (was Conjugate is weird)
From: James Amundson
Date: Tue, 15 Apr 2003 17:44:14 -0500
On Mon, 2003-04-14 at 10:04, Raymond Toy wrote:
> I personally prefer case insensitive. But I must be unusual in this
> regard because even in languages that ARE case sensitive, I rarely use
> that feature. It's hard to pronounce case-sensitive names and it's
> equally hard to decide how to capitalize long names that are
> abbreviated in some way.
Let me make a couple of points clear:
1) We are talking about the case-sensitivity of the Maxima language, not
the lisp that it is written in. We will continue to use case-insensitive
lisp.
2) I propose to make all of the maxima code use a single case (lower
case). There will be no InterCaps, or other use of mixed case.
(InterCaps were cool to me when I first saw them used in the 80's. Now
they seem as about as tasteful as many other things that were cool in
the 80's, e.g., MiamiVice.) We could make "all lower case maxima code" a
coding standard.
Does putting the code in all lower-case make case-sensitivity sound more
palatable to you?
> James> It looks like my opinion is compatible with Richard's opinion. I think
> James> his spelling corrector suggestion could be a reasonable way to ease the
> James> transition.
>
> I guess I'm also a minimalist here. I don't want a spelling
> corrector. DWIM (do what I mean) never works well enough for me. I
> want a read-my-mind-and-dwim system. :-)
I certainly never had a DWIM system in mind, even though I can see how
my wording would lead you to think that. I was thinking about a system
like Mathematica's. Mathematica simply warns you when you have used a
symbol that is similar to an existing symbol. It is important that such
warnings can be turned off.
I would not want a system that tried to make corrections for me, either.
I don't think that's what Richard had in mind when he first proposed
spelling checking.
> In any case, I will let James and others set the direction.
I want to fully understand all the arguments before any decisions are
made. Please continue to speak up.
--Jim