> Didn't you say mathematicians should have double votes? Is mathematics > insensitive to case?
Okay, I accept that this is a strong argument, much more persuasive to me than the ones about technical difficulty (already a problem that has to be surmounted for string-ci=? whether or not you case-fold identifiers) or the ones about alternate spellings (maybe it'd be nice if languages could do that much DWIM, but not being able to advance is no reason to retreat). Mathematicians have, I'm afraid, suffered from their initial decision that variables must have single-letter names. I think that's why they've had to recycle the same letter to mean different things in the same equation! In studying math texts (especially those Dover ones that have more formulas than explanatory words) I've gotten confused many times because the same letter meant different things in different fonts -- that's even worse than case sensitivity! But I grant you that they've managed to do quite a lot of good work despite this handicap. :-) And, yes, more seriously, I stand by mathematicians getting extra votes, and all I can say is that, like all of us, I've done plenty of programming in both case-sensitive and case-insensitive languages, and I find the latter a lot more relaxing and bug-resistant. What I'm really dreading are the problems that will arise because of characters that have different Unicode codes but look identical. _______________________________________________ r6rs-discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.r6rs.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/r6rs-discuss
