Subject: Re: ACL 6.0 Trial Edition ships with non ANSI reader behavior. From: Erik Naggum <erik@naggum.net> Date: 06 Nov 2000 07:19:15 +0000 Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp Message-ID: <3182483955225808@naggum.net> * Kent M Pitman <pitman@world.std.com> | Did they change this right before the final spec? I'd swear it was | not case sensitive (except entities) right up until the end. SGML | is not case sensitive for element names, is it? How can XML be an | SGML subset and have case sensitive names? Am I just hopelessly | confused here. SGML does not specify case sensitivity, only the means to specify it. The SGML declaration includes that specification in the NAMING NAMECASE GENERAL or ENTITY fields. | I think facility of manual typein is WAY more important. Curiously, that _is_ also an argument for lower-case symbols as well as a case-sensitive reader. | Not to mention the other niceties like usefulness in transmitted | ascii text of uppercasing CAR, CDR, etc. to make them stand out when | fonting isn't handy. I could go on but won't. I think it boils down to familiarity. You don't need upper-case symbols in Lisp to write them in upper-case in the text. I grew up on TOPS-10 and -20, where upper-case and case insensitivity was the rule, on TOPS-10 also without exception... It was a hassle to get lower-case letters in filenames under TOPS-20 as they each had to be escaped with ^V, even in source code. (Why _do_ I remember these things? :) Several of the (now) old-timers I met at the time have a fondness for upper- case that escapes me (no pun intended, sadly). I learned to write a technical handwriting as a kid and I never got used to this longhand cruft that could not possibly become readable no matter how you did it, so I have very legible small letters, too, and highly prefer them to writing print in capital. Over the years, I have found a strange attraction to lower-case that predated my exposure to Unix, but it sure felt good the first time I met a Unix system in 1980. And all upper-case still feels "clunky" to me. #:Erik -- Does anyone remember where I parked Air Force One? -- George W. Bush