It's interesting (no sarcasm; honestly) to observe by which point people identify Scheme. I always felt case insensitivity in Lisp world is a historical artifact, from the time when you had only capital letters on computers. But I'm a late comer so I may be wrong. (I started playing with Lisp around late-80s, and never wrote a serious chunk of Lisp/Scheme code until mid-90s.)
But the point taken. If you identify Scheme in its case insensitive nature, you'll feel a big discontinuity in the change. Other critiques to R6RS may also be boiled down to the difference of people's perception of "What makes Scheme Scheme?". From: "Guillermo J. Rozas" <[email protected]> Subject: Re: [r6rs-discuss] Case sensitivity Date: Sat, 21 Feb 2009 16:36:45 -0800 > > Since we don't need to choose one or the other now, how about > > giving it a try? > > Giving case sensitivity a try? Sorry, but I do that all the time by > programming > in other languages. I don't like it there any more than I do in Scheme. > > As I said earlier, almost every project that I'm involved with starts > by outlawing > differences based on case even if the language allows it. > > With good reason. > > Hence, in what way is the language case sensitivity helping me? Here you're arguing case sensitivity is no better than case insensitivity. I'm not arguing with that. In the part I replied to you, you told case sensitivity is worse, since you'd be confused. That's what I argued. And you seem to know you won't be confused, with a sane convention like you mentioned. But if you think case insensitivity is a part of identity of Scheme, of course you'll push case insensitivity if all other things are equal. I understand that. > > On the other hand, I've got some headaches working on DSL in > > Lisp/Scheme that interacts with case-sensitive world, when > > the implementation is case-insensitive. > > I am puzzled about that one. > > Are you trying to embed the DSLs in Scheme? Not just 'trying'. I've been using them in production code for years. > Don't the many other aspects of Scheme such as the > parenthesis-based prefix syntax already cause you much > more grief? On the contrary, I sometimes even write C in S-expression these days. It allows me to use macros much powerful than the original C, which is liberating. --shiro _______________________________________________ r6rs-discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.r6rs.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/r6rs-discuss
