Case-sensitivity goals, policy and implementation

Hi there.

Andrey Grozin wrote:

| On Mon, 11 Oct 2004, Vadim V. Zhytnikov wrote:
| > I'm inclined to agree with Andrey Grozin than the only
| > two options which are simple enough to rule out any confusion are
| > either absolute case sensitivity or absolute case insensitivity.
| > And I think than case sensitivity is more suitable for Maxima.
| > Why?  Case insensitivity may be good for programmer languages -
| > in this case long more or less self  explanatory names like
| > "my_super_foo_bar_function" are generally considered as a good style.
| > But Maxima is not only and maybe even not primarily programmer
| language -
| > it is language for mathematical expressions.  But traditionally
| > mathematical notation tends to be concise.  It is
| > useful to have more different variables with short
| > names - after all it is easier to read and understand
| > long mathematical expression with short variables.
| I agree. I want to follow mathematical notations. And if the problem says
| "Consider two particles with masses M and m", I want to denote them M and
| m.

I agree completely.  Most mathematical models I see have mixed case
variables and constants (but also bolded text, Greek characters etc).  A
quick glance at the notation/symbol list in chemical engineering books such
as Bird et al's classic "Transport Phenomena" indirectly support this
observation.

Furthermore, putting a couple of obvious examples aside, most modern
languages are case sensitive right down to the bones of the libraries
accessed by the linker.

On the other hand, I like Cliff's suggestion which seems to imply that if
Maxima were to be treated as a server behind a GUI front end which dealt
with issues such as case and extended character sets by uniquely mapping
input names, then there is probably no need to get too worried about the
issue other than to choose one of case in/sensitivity.

I can imagine XMaxima being extended in that way.  The advantage of this is
that you don't get caught up in the question of whether or not any
particular CL compiler supports case sensitivity/Unicode.

Cheers

Mike Thomas.