Case-sensitivity goals, policy and implementation

Greetings!

Stavros Macrakis <macrakis@gmail.com> writes:

> Yes, I did misunderstood your proposal.  "Never mind."  Let's try
> again.   Let me rephrase your proposal to see if I understand this
> time:
> 
> a) Lowercase in Maxima is represented as uppercase internally and vice versa.
> 
> b) The implementation is: use a local readtable for interning Maxima
> symbols, using readtable-case; and a local value of *print-case* when
> displaying Maxima symbols.
> 
> (a) seems like a reasonable approach, but I am not sure that (b) makes
> the implementation all that easy:
> 
> -- Does GCL implement readtable-case?  If so, I guess it is not in the
> default package.  Is there some other way of remapping characters?
> 

We don't yet have readtable-case.  Its on the ansi todo list.  If
anyone can make a cogent argument to place it near the top in terms of
priority, I'm open to suggestions.  In general, a priority ranked list
of ansi items would be very helpful.

Take care,

> -- Presumably we'll need a Maxima version and a non-Maxima version of
> intern, explodec, etc.  Those are easy to write.  How much work will
> it be to figure out which one to use where?  There are already
> case-fiddling versions of implode etc. -- these will have to be
> studied.
> 
> -- There are cases where case is manipulated explicitly, e.g. in
> read-command-token-aux.  I suspect this (and similar cases) doesn't
> need to be changed, but someone needs to look at it.
> 
> -- On output, I don't think *print-case* is any help, since
> displa.lisp doesn't use print at all.  See the list-string function. 
> The code needs to be read over carefully.
> 
> -- All uses of getcharn etc. are also going to have to be studied.
> 
> All in all, I have nothing against using the readtable mechanism (if
> GCL implements it), but it doesn't seem to avoid having to read
> through all the code that touches intern etc., and it doesn't help at
> all for output.
> 
> What am I missing?
> 
>          -s
> 
> _______________________________________________
> Maxima mailing list
> Maxima@www.math.utexas.edu
> http://www.math.utexas.edu/mailman/listinfo/maxima
> 
> 
> 

-- 
Camm Maguire			     			camm@enhanced.com
==========================================================================
"The earth is but one country, and mankind its citizens."  --  Baha'u'llah