Really? Just aesthetics? :-o

I supposed it had some practical goal I was missing, since for example the original Rc paper still referred to $IFS.

This would flips the question a bit: I wonder why the same designers chose uppercase variable names while designing Unix... :-)

Giacomo

2017-10-17 16:39 GMT+02:00 Dan Cross <crossd@gmail.com>:

On Tue, Oct 17, 2017 at 10:38 AM, Giacomo Tesio <giacomo@tesio.it> wrote:
> Out of curiosity, do anybody know why Plan9 designers chose lowercase
> variables over uppercase ones?
>
> At first, given the different conventions between rc and sh (eg $path is an
> array, while $PATH is a string), I supposed Plan 9 designers wanted to
> prevent conflict with unix tools relying to the older conventions.
>
> However, I'm not sure this was the main reason, as this also open to subtle
> issues: if a unix shell modifies $IFS and then invoke an rc script, such
> script will ignore the change and keep using the previous $ifs.
>
>
> As far as I can see, APE does not attempt any translation between the two
> conventions, so maybe I'm just missing something obvious...
>
>
> Do anyone know what considerations led to such design decision?

Aesthetics.