From: eric dahlman <dahl...@cs.colostate.edu>
Subject: The Aesthetics of Symbols (was Re: Uppercasing symbols)
Date: 1998/12/08
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Organization: Colorado State University, Fort Collins, CO  80523
Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp

Hi all,

One point that I can't remember anyone making here with regard to the
whole symbol case and or sensitivity is the ergonomics of the font and
case used.  There is a reason that the majority of printed text that
we read in the day is in lower case, that being that it is easer to
read.  (Others also make a case for the fact that serifed fonts are
easer to read than their sans counterparts. The books by Edward
R. Tufte include some nice reasons for why fonts are designed as they
are, among other things.)  Some of the comparisons made to the use of
all caps on billboards and other "short duration" texts is not really
relevant in my mind in this case.  I will not spend large amounts of
time reading billboards, while I will spend hours reading a book or
code.  IMAGINE READING 500+ PAGES OF TEXT THAT IS IN ALL CAPITAL
LETTERS IT CAN BECOME TIRESOME AFTER A WHILE.

In natural languages case serves a very important role based primarily
on its absence, case accentuates some point of the text or comments on
its content.  For instance, case can be used to mark "important"
elements of the text: names, the first word of a sentence, objects in
German.  In all of these cases the removal of case will not usually
inhibit the understanding of what is being presented but it will
reduce the ease of understanding.  Likewise, in computer languages
this added extra syntactic information can be useful to the reader of
the code.  A good Lisp example of this is the practice of using all
caps to refer to arguments and the like in argument strings.  This
distinguishes between the two worlds of discourse, that of the natural
language string and the Lisp program.  This type of comment would not
be possible where case syntactically important.

If we were to have a case sensitive reader my primary objection would
be that such a reader precludes the use of case in an extra syntactic
way.  However, if we could go back to the days of LispM's where source
code could be written with different type faces to communicate many of
the non-syntactic things that case is used for I would have a lot less
to complain about.

-Eric