Case-sensitivity goals, policy and implementation

People feel strongly about this on both sides.
I, for example, prefer case sensitivity for programming
because I want programs to look like ordinary Math
notation when possible. So I disagree with you
as a "default".  This does not mean we cannot
both be accomodated.

The controversy and various approaches
has been pounded to death by the people at
Franz Inc, some of whom feel strongly that the ANSI
CL decision was wrong (case insensitive), but
that it must be accomodated somehow.


Here is a solution for your particular case that
might be appealing to you.

A flag to the reader program in Maxima that says:
when I type in to the top level, convert all my
characters to lower case.  Thus cOmMoN  would become
common before processing. The output would be simply
common.

The name of the flag might be
downcase_all_input.   Or maybe  DoWNcASe_All_INPuT :)

This might also appeal to people who randomly type
SIN or sin or Sin  and mean the same thing.

Note that Maple uses the convention that integrate
and Integrate mean different things. Somewhat similar
to the verb and noun forms in Maxima.  This is
probably a good idea since the noun and verb forms
in Maxima looking the same on output leads to confusion.

(The Franz Inc solution would be to allow cOmMoN to be
mapped either to COMMON or common or left alone. The
possible flag settings include (I think) case-insensitive-upper
case-insensitive-lower case-sensitive.

Regards
RJF



:Albert Reiner wrote:

>     [ Posting this on behalf of "Dudley, Jeremy" <Dudley_J@wrcplc.co.uk>,
>       whose posting from Mon, 11 Oct 2004 14:31:31 +0100 was rejected: ]
> 
> "In maths, I am used to case sensitivity. As a simple example, 'a' being a
> vector and 'A' being a matrix. In programming, I loathe case sensitivity. I
> want 'a' and 'A' to be the same, not a cause for confusion; too often do I
> type something like 'COmmon' when I want 'Common.' In a language that
> demands variable declaration this can be picked up, at least to some extent.
> Maxima does not demand such an approach, so the risk of propagation of
> mistakes seems too high."
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