On Feb 21, Guillermo J. Rozas wrote:
>
> On Feb 21, 2009, at 1:24 PM, Eli Barzilay wrote:
>
> > On Feb 21, Guillermo J. Rozas wrote:
> >>
> >> It _is_ an arbitrary choice, and Scheme, like many Lisp dialects,
> >> had traditionally been case insensitive. R6RS decided to be
> >> gratuitously incompatible.
> >
> > "These days" case-insensitive Lisp dialects are gratuitously
> > incompatible with most of the rest of the world. (And IMO the
> > argument of "Lisp existed before Unicode, and will exist after it" is
> > a poor one.)
>
> Really?
>
> The Windows and MacIntosh file systems are case insensitive.
>
> That's a gratuituous incompatibility?
Yes. (In the OSX case, IIUC, you can now format a case-sensitive FS;
and in the Windows case the choice was done ages ago, and nearly
nothing changes on Windows...)
But I did say "most". It's safe to assume that for every example of a
case insensitive piece of software I can find about 10 case sensitive
ones. Anecdotal evidence is therefore not going to be a good tool for
advocating case insensitivity.
> The universe of programmers is far smaller than the universe of
> computer users, and computer users (except for ordinary Unix ones,
> which tends to be a subset of the universe of programmers) would
> scream if they ever had to deal with case sensitivity.
We're not talking about users, we're talking about programmers.
--
((lambda (x) (x x)) (lambda (x) (x x))) Eli Barzilay:
http://www.barzilay.org/ Maze is Life!
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