On Feb 21, 2009, at 5:14 PM, Shiro Kawai wrote: > 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.)
Case sensitivity in the other languages is a historical artifact. :-) > > But the point taken. If you identify Scheme in its case > insensitive nature, you'll feel a big discontinuity in the change. No. You misunderstand. There are those features that are essential to Scheme. Changing those would make the language not be Scheme any more. For example, adding a second (function) name-space, as in Common Lisp. There are those features whose change brings a painful discontinuity. They are not necessarily essential. They are arbitrary. They could have been either way from the start. Changing them, nevertheless, is painful. R6RS changed some of these, with case sensitivity being one. An earlier report (plus the IEEE standard) changed '() vs. #f. It's not that it stopped being Scheme for being case sensitive. It's that it caused grief, and since the decision is ultimately arbitrary, there should be a very high hurdle to changing it. The R6RS process, either through its opaqueness or through its haughtiness, appears to have ignored this grief and made, what appear to the community at large to be gratuitous incompatible changes cavalierly. This is, I suspect, a large part of the gut reaction against it. 'They ignored my constraints/wishes, I'll ignore what they did'. > > Other critiques to R6RS may also be boiled down to the > difference of people's perception of "What makes Scheme Scheme?". Again, I'm not saying that a case-sensitive Scheme is any less 'a Scheme' than a case-insensitive one in an essential sense. But Scheme was case insensitive, and changing this aspect shows cavalier disregard for the user base. This is orthogonal to the fact that some of us seriously prefer case- insensitivity in languages. I'd prefer C to be case insensitive too. _______________________________________________ r6rs-discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.r6rs.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/r6rs-discuss
