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Message from discussion Uppercasing symbols
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Tim Bradshaw  
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 More options Dec 7 1998, 3:00 am
Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp
From: Tim Bradshaw <t...@aiai.ed.ac.uk>
Date: 1998/12/07
Subject: Re: Uppercasing symbols
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* William Paul Vrotney wrote:

> I can go either way on the default case mode for reading of symbols, so I am
> not ultimately trying to argue for one over the other, I just want to
> understand the how programmers use case in Lisp.  But here is a mind
> experiment for you to help me answer my original query into these phenomena.
> Suppose that we had originally defined Lisp to be case sensitive reading of
> symbols, which eliminates the historical issues, and allow me to assume for
> the sake of this mind experiment that we are not going to consider the fact
> we can distinguish PRINT in prose (something I like by the way) is an
> important enough reason to define a language spec.  Then today, would Lisp
> programmers have reasons to ever want the case insensitive version and for
> what reasons?

I would want a case insensitive reader, and I would mandate it for any
projects I ran.

Why?  Because I find that I spend a huge amount of time when dealing
with a certain common style of C/C++/Java programming which likes to
name everything in weird-mixed-case -- FooInstance, (or should that be
fooInstance?) FooClass, MakeFoo.  Whenever I have to deal with these
things I find that: (1) it takes me significantly longer to type
things because I have to blip the shift key all the time, and I am not
a good enough typist to be able to type flat out while inserting
apparently randomly-distributed caps (so I get MakefOo of MakeFOo);
(2) I make mistakes because I can't remember the right case,
especially since the conventions are not always obvious.

Of course, it may be that in the kinds of languages where that style
thrives, things are so hard to write in any case, that being able to
type reasonably fluently is not an issue, so the capitalisation
doesn't hurt you.  But in Lisp I often find that, once I've worked out
what I want to do, I type chunks of code almost at the speed I am
typing this message, so it would really hurt me.

(It's interesting that zmacs has a mode where it automagically types
code in CAPS and comments in ordinary case. That works OK for the
style some people like, but it wouldn't generalise to the StudLy style
unless you had very sophisticated analysis in there).

--tim


 
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