On Tue, Feb 25, 2014 at 4:40 PM, Felix Lange fjl@twurst.com wrote:
Sorry for hijacking this discussion.
No problem. There are no stupid questions (but see the famous "cluelessness" demotivational poster).
Why are system names case sensitive at all? Wouldn't it be more sane to just make them case-insensitive?
It is more complicated to perform case-insensitive file search on a case-sensitive filesystem, of course.
Well, in practice, people either use symbols, that are downcased, or strings, with a lowercase convention. Therefore, system names are case sensitive, but there is a strong case-converting bias towards lowercase. This both makes it hard to involuntarily stray from the common practical case, yet possible to those who really care to.
Should non-lowercase strings be either forbidden or case-converted? That's a backward incompatible change that would need to be tested with cl-test-grid before it's committed — and even then might affect unpublished or proprietary code by other users.
So far, this legacy system (inherited from Dan Barlow's ASDF) has worked fine, and I don't see what is to be gained with this incompatible change. I'm not the maintainer anymore, though, so it's not my decision to make.
—♯ƒ • François-René ÐVB Rideau •Reflection&Cybernethics• http://fare.tunes.org A student who changes the course of history is probably taking an exam.