Yes, absolutely, but why should we distinguish on the bases of 'case' and not 'font'? They are different glyphs after all.
I doubt seriously that anyone would argue that a 'Times Roman' lower- case 'a' would be different from a 'Helvetica' lower-case 'a'. It _is_ an arbitrary choice, and Scheme, like many Lisp dialects, had traditionally been case insensitive. R6RS decided to be gratuitously incompatible. And #!case-fold and #!no-case-fold is just punting the issue. Now, I have to search for those if I want to read a piece of code and not be confused. On Feb 21, 2009, at 12:52 PM, Shiro Kawai wrote: > 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 'あ' (U+3042) and > 'ア' (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 > > _______________________________________________ r6rs-discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.r6rs.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/r6rs-discuss
