SCHEME and AKCL (Austin Kyoto Common LISP) are installed on the SUN,
but these LISPs do not distinguish between upper and lower case.
Not surprising. AKCL, as the name implies, is an implementation of Common
Lisp, and Common Lisp (unlike Franz Lisp) not case-sensitive. Actually,
the situation is a bit more complex than this: Common Lisp just gives the
appearance of case-insensitivity because it maps symbols to all-upper-case
at read-time.
The Franz Inc. people believed strongly that Common Lisp should follow the
case-sensitive Franz Lisp model; a lot of other people felt that
case-sensitivity in symbols was a terrible idea. There was a big fight
about this. The Franz people lost, but they put special switches into
their Allegro Common Lisp to accommodate people who wanted Franz-like
case-senstivity. This mode may even be on by default -- I haven't checked
lately.
(3) Can AKCL be made case sensitive (lower case function names and
upper/lower case distinction within literals)?
This may be possible with some surgery, but I believe that it is not easy.
All the built-in symbol-names in Common Lisp are really upper-case, so if
you force case-sensitivity, that's what you get.
(5) Is CMU CL on DECStations under Ultrix in a usable state for
non-exotic applications?
No. At present, it doesn't run at all on Decstations under Ultrix. See my
earlier post on the reasons for this. Whenever Ultrix turns into OSF/1, we
should run on it just fine. But we don't support Franz-style
case-sensitivity in symbols, and never plan to.
Franz Lisp is not the same as Common Lisp. If you want to convert old
Franz Lisp code to run in Common Lisp, dealing with the case-sensitivity is
a very small part of the problem -- you just have to find all pairs of
symbols that are spelled identically but capitalized differently, and then
change the spelling of one or the other. Often there are very few of
these. Everything else can be left in whatever case you prefer. As a
one-shot conversion, this isn't too much of a hassle.
If, for whatever reason, you really feel you MUST stay with a
case-sensitive system, and if you don't want to do major surgery on some
other Common Lisp, then I think the only choice is Allegro. They've got
just what you want, but at a price. Or maybe someone has upgraded the old
public-domain Franz system for Decstations.
-- Scott
From: Jeff Dalton
Subject: Re: Advice on LISPs ?
Date:
Message-ID: <5534@skye.ed.ac.uk>
In article <······················@cs.cmu.edu> ···@sef-pmax.slisp.cs.cmu.edu writes:
>But we don't support Franz-style case-sensitivity in symbols, and
>never plan to.
On the other hand, there is a different way of doing case-sensitivity
specified in CLtL II and I hope that CMU CL will eventually implement
it.
Feelings sometimes run high when case-sensitivity is discussed.
Some people think that case-sensitivity is useless at best. But
there are uses for it and it can be annoying that Common Lisp,
which has so many useful features, lacks this one. I don't want
to get into a debate about whether case-sensitivity is a good
thing or not. I wouldn't use it to distinugish names in Lisp
code, but that isn't the only reason for wanting the Lisp
reader to be able to maintain case values.
-- jeff