Subject: Re: Allegro CL 6.0 Trial Edition From: Erik Naggum <erik@naggum.net> Date: 2000/11/03 Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp Message-ID: <3182258161173247@naggum.net> * David J. Fiander | Of course, people who've studied the history of the book (which I | haven't particularly), will happily point out that capitalization | (the use of majiscules at the beginning of sentences), punctuation | (including the use of spaces between words), and even paragraphing | were all _invented_ to ease the reading process [1]. Yeah, yeah, whatever. Please try to get the point, and try to control that trigger-itchy posting finger with your special agenda physically attached to it. Please also _try_ to use your reading skills to such astonishing endeavors as actually observing that nobody is arguing against whitespace or punctutation. Christ, guys, go nuts for all I care, but keep it within _range_ of what is being discussed, will you? What _I_ observed when I wanted to preserve the case of _words_ was that a fairly large number of people went ballistic over this and losing their marbles in the process. Actually being able to deal with a single, isolated change to a system they do not understand how came to be, was impossible: They react as if the whole system was rejected, and spelling and grammar with it, in my cases. I must admit that I found such people tremendously entertaining for a while, but watching crazy people go lemming over the far edge of reason got old fast. I imagined a sphinxter so tight it would have saved the Kursk crew, setting new records in anal retentive behavior and the like, but really, why is it _impossible_ for those who think that the entire world order and humanity's last chance rests with capitalizing that first letter of a sentence to realize that their fears might not be true. I am very well aware of the arguments for typography, and I have in fact studied it, but that does not mean that I have to agree that the information-destroying _print_ habit of losing case information for the first word in a sentence is smart for electronic text before it goes to print. Almost everything is improved by case sensitivity (such as Common Lisp, to keep this marginally on topic :), and search engines that didn't match all kinds of words when you search for proper names would be a good thing. But not as long as the anal retentives come crawling out of the woodwork every time they don't get the difference between source code for a book (electronic text) and published print copy. #:Erik -- Does anyone remember where I parked Air Force One? -- George W. Bush