[TUHS] Lisp is a family quarrel

[cowan@mercury.ccil.org (John Cowan)]

Tim Bradshaw scripsit:

> And actually that's the only reason for needing a caps lock key really:
> for systems which *had* no lowercase, then you wouldn't need a caps
> lock key because you couldn't *type* lowercase!

As I said, it allows you to adjust to a mismatch: a keyboard that types
lower case by default, software that rejects lower case.

> (Lisp being more correctly thought of as a religion than a programming
> language).

	"Do you know the saying, Karhide is not a nation but a family
	quarrel?" I haven't, and suspect that Estraven made it up;
	it has his stamp.
		--Le Guin, _The Left Hand of Darkness_

Lisp, too, is a family quarrel.  Scheme is even more so than Common Lisp;
CL is a language, but Scheme is a family of languages, perhaps 80 of them.
The minimalist R5RS standard of 1998 was case-folding, like all standards
before it, but perhaps half of all implementations ignored this and were
case-sensitive.  In practice, case-folding implementations folded to lower
case, and where case was not folded, the standard identifiers were lower
case.  The latter position is a feature of the case-sensitive R6RS (2007)
and R7RS-small (2013) standards.  At present, case-sensitivity dominates
in the 40+ implementations that I use for test purposes by about two to one.

-- 
John Cowan          http://www.ccil.org/~cowan        cowan at ccil.org
After fixing the Y2K bug in an application:
        WELCOME TO <censored>
        DATE: MONDAK, JANUARK 1, 1900