Re: Downcase of a symbol

[David Kastrup]

Urs Liska <address@hidden> writes:

> Am 13.08.2016 um 08:10 schrieb David Kastrup:
>> Urs Liska <address@hidden> writes:
>>
>>> I have written a function to return the lowercase version of a symbol
>>> for use in my library as
>>>
>>> % Return the lowercase version of a symbol
>>> #(define (symbol->lowercase sym)
>>>    (string->symbol
>>>     (string-downcase
>>>      (symbol->string sym))))
>>>
>>> Just a small question: this seems so general
>> Why?  What would that be useful for?  Normal convention for symbols is
>> already lowercase.
>
> I accept package/module names as a symbol-list path, and users are
> allowed to write them using "display" names, like
>
> \loadModule scholarLY.annotate
>
> Internally I'm converting them to lowercase to prevent ambiguity, so
> input is a symbol but with arbitrary case. Having a list of strings
> would be much less convenient to use.

Case insensitivity is almost never a good idea.  It leads to stuff that
sometimes works and sometimes fails under mysterious circumstances.

For example, you are aware that in a Turkish locale, I downcases to ı
instead of i , and i uppercases to İ instead of I ?

And if you do search-and-replace operations (like convert-ly does) for
code changes, you'll only catch some parts.

-- 
David Kastrup