From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: cowan@mercury.ccil.org (John Cowan) Date: Sat, 2 Aug 2014 10:28:17 -0400 Subject: [TUHS] Lisp is a family quarrel In-Reply-To: <63E407A2-C677-4C73-A69F-02CDE5F68F36@tfeb.org> References: <53db573b.rwfkVi3XCkWueUYL%dnied@tiscali.it> <20140801105029.58656ubc05nkkh2d@webmail.mhorton.net> <20140801203508.GF13476@mercury.ccil.org> <70C2F527-099F-4BE8-BBFB-CBCAAAEB40C0@tfeb.org> <20140802034551.GA30208@eureka.lemis.com> <63E407A2-C677-4C73-A69F-02CDE5F68F36@tfeb.org> Message-ID: <20140802142816.GB15007@mercury.ccil.org> 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 DATE: MONDAK, JANUARK 1, 1900