[R6RS] Case sensitivity

Michael Sperber sperber
Sun Oct 31 15:52:29 EST 2004


I thought it'd be a good idea to document the various arguments on
case sensitivity before we go to any kind of vote.

Against:

- R5RS is case-insensitive; changing this would break programs

- HCI research indicates that case insensitivity is more
  user-friendly.

- Case insensitivity means people can be more liberal when writing
  text containing Scheme identifiers.  (R5RS has many sentences
  starting with capitalized identifiers.)

For:

- The identifier syntaxes of many other programming languages---and
  XML---can be expressed as regular representable Scheme symbols.

- Symbols are case-sensitive already; it's just the literals where the
  case gets evened out.

- The community probably wants it.

I'd appreciate if people added to this list.  I remember Will hinting
at some more arguments that weren't clear to me.  I'd also like to
have a little debate over the "interoperability argument" eventually.

-- 
Cheers =8-} Mike
Friede, V?lkerverst?ndigung und ?berhaupt blabla


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