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I'd love to see one of these revitalizations of CL that gets rid of the ALLCAPS. I know it's a small aesthetic thing but it drives me crazy.

I found a snippet somewhere that messes with string interning and so symbols don't instantly get capitalized, but there's still way too much shouting.



You're looking for (setq *print-case* :downcase), no need to mess with the reader.


(You can put this in ~/.sbclrc or your implementation's equivalent dot file!)

(Tangentially: I've encountered Common Lisp libraries in that wild that actually break if you do this, highly surprising bugs where the author was doing something too-clever with symbols and compared their representation against hard-coded strings, such that changing your *IDE's default print case* had the effect of breaking a very low-level library. This isn't important to anyone else here; I just wanted to vent. I have so much programming pain that only I know about and no one else in the world shares).


CL is case-sensitive, but it handles things so you typically don't have to be aware of it. I don't think I'm smart enough to try to do something clever on top of that, so I hope I can avoid your pain.


> compared their representation against hard-coded strings

Ah, used string= instead of string-equal, did they? Simple mistake to make, not keeping CL being case-insensitive in mind.


I always liked it. I type lowercase, the computer speaks back uppercase. We know who said what. It's also nostalgia for BASIC. ;-)




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