[r6rs-discuss] Case sensitivity

[Shiro Kawai]

From: "Guillermo J. Rozas" <gjr6765 at gmail.com>
Subject: Re: [r6rs-discuss] Case sensitivity
Date: Sat, 21 Feb 2009 13:02:04 -0800

> Yes, absolutely, but why should we distinguish on the bases of 'case'
> and not 'font'?  They are different glyphs after all.

I think you're not serious, but just sarcastic, right?
I know there's a subtle issues between glyphs and characters,
but I assume there is a general concensus on what's
character-level difference and what's glyph-level difference.

> And #!case-fold and #!no-case-fold is just punting the issue.
> Now, I have to search for those if I want to read a piece of code and  
> not be
> confused.

Have you ever encountered such code in practice, instead of
contrived examples? 

--shiro


> On Feb 21, 2009, at 12:52 PM, Shiro Kawai wrote:
> 
> > From: "Guillermo J. Rozas" <gjr6765 at gmail.com>
> > Subject: [r6rs-discuss] Case sensitivity
> > Date: Sat, 21 Feb 2009 11:35:05 -0800
> >
> >> But the real reason is that some people have C/Java 'envy' and have
> >> always had case sensitive
> >> implementations, and have been trying to foist this on the rest for
> >> ages (ever since R2RS).
> >
> > I'm not sure it is 'envy', but I started programming in C before
> > coming to Lisp/Scheme, and case-insensitivity did struck me weird.
> > But what's more perplexing is the debate about it.  My native
> > language doesn't have a concept of "case" at all.   Thus, to me,
> > 'A' and 'a' are different characters, that happened to be
> > exchangeable in certain occasions.  Like 'あ' (U+3042) and
> > 'ア' (U+30a2)---no Japanese would argue to fold these two.
> > I suspect cultural issue in background is not negligible.
> >
> > Anyways, I frequently implement DSLs on top of Scheme, and some
> > of such DSLs 'compiles' into case-sensitive languages.  Writing
> > case-sensitive symbols with escaped notation clutters the code
> > horribly and decreases the value of DSLs significantly.   Thus
> > I welcomed R6RS's choice of case sensitivity.
> >
> > (BTW, now we can switch them by #!case-fold and #!no-case-fold,
> > why are we discussing about this?)
> >
> > --shiro
> >
> >
>