Question for all of you: Over the past week or so I have been introduced to the notion that the purpose of this list is to facilitate the forward progress of those who are employed as language design experts and researchers: Namely professional computer scientists called PhD Students, associate professors, and professors. Is that accurate?
The reason I ask, in regards to this topic of case insensitivty in particular, is that a lot of arguments have come up in regards to it having to do with: - Unicode support and difficulty case-folding (if possible at all) in certain languages - The history of Scheme - Interfacing with "foreign" systems or code - The intent behind what we call variable names (are '2' and 'two' the same?) - Whether the language or the tools, or a library for the language should do the work for us - Personal experience/preference leaning in one direction or another. Given all of the potentially valid takes here: 1. Does all of this discussion contribute to these experts? 2. Who are the experts to prioritize these topics and move forward with them. 3. What makes them experts? When I look at case-insensitivty, I find that with Scheme, and even with Eiffel; people are disproportionately disturbed by the "lack of flexibility" to the actual impact it has on them (ignoring the already made good points that explain why it would be an issue, FFI or DSL or Unicode). I find that as a selfish American programmer; I focus on case in terms of the English language; and when it comes to programming, 80% of the time I never rely on case to distinguish variables. For everything else, and everyone else; the experts have to do right. For that reason, then; I wonder where non-expert input fits on topics like this? Is it just chatter? Best wishes, Grant Rettke _______________________________________________ r6rs-discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.r6rs.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/r6rs-discuss
