From: "Guillermo J. Rozas" <[email protected]>
Subject: [r6rs-discuss] Case sensitivity
Date: Sat, 21 Feb 2009 11:35:05 -0800

> But the real reason is that some people have C/Java 'envy' and have  
> always had case sensitive
> implementations, and have been trying to foist this on the rest for  
> ages (ever since R2RS).

I'm not sure it is 'envy', but I started programming in C before
coming to Lisp/Scheme, and case-insensitivity did struck me weird.
But what's more perplexing is the debate about it.  My native
language doesn't have a concept of "case" at all.   Thus, to me,
'A' and 'a' are different characters, that happened to be
exchangeable in certain occasions.  Like '$B$"(B' (U+3042) and
'$B%"(B' (U+30a2)---no Japanese would argue to fold these two.
I suspect cultural issue in background is not negligible.

Anyways, I frequently implement DSLs on top of Scheme, and some
of such DSLs 'compiles' into case-sensitive languages.  Writing
case-sensitive symbols with escaped notation clutters the code
horribly and decreases the value of DSLs significantly.   Thus
I welcomed R6RS's choice of case sensitivity.

(BTW, now we can switch them by #!case-fold and #!no-case-fold,
why are we discussing about this?)

--shiro



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