Hi, Guillermo J. Rozas wrote: >>> But to be a computer programmer, you have to be a computer user[*]. >>> Since to be a computer user, you must already be used to a case- >>> insensitive >>> file system, making the language case-insensitive presents no new >>> mechanisms. >> >> *cough* I use a computer. Thus I am a computer user. As it happens, >> I'm used to a case sensitive file system. > > Yes, and in the original message where I wrote about the file systems, > I already granted that Unix (in general, not the MacOS version) use case > sensitive file systems, but also that most people who use (non MacOS) > Unix are also programmers.
Ok, but in the message I replied to, you quite explicitly assumed that all computer users used case insensitive file systems. Get your story straight and quit moving around. Furthermore, I doubt that the "most Unix users are programmers" characterization holds any longer. I don't have hard data to back this up, though, and it is a peripheral point, so it probably isn't worth arguing further. I'll happily concede it for the sake of argument. If you're trying for '"regular users" have case insensitivity everywhere', I think you're far better off going for URLs and email addresses, anyway. The filesystem thing is a bit of a red herring for you. >>> Perfect example of 'sample bias'. >>> >> >> Actually, no. Perfect example of 'sample'. What bias is there in who >> is on the list at any given time? > > self-selection. Again, self-selection only means that we've selected against "Don't care" votes, which are useless anyway. I see no reason at all to suspect that cs people would be more likely to self-select than ci people or vice versa. >> Did the pollster somehow magically >> know that people who like case insensitivity would be looking at the >> list at say 5:00 in the evening and avoid that time therefore? > > Lack of knowledge does not mean that there is no correlation. Yes, and the fairies hiding behind the trees probably changed some people's votes, too. We can make believe problems with a sample 'til the cows come home. Do you have any real reason to suspect that the poll was other than an unbiased sample of people who both care about the future of scheme and who care about case sensitivity? If so, please share details of the mechanism by which this systematic bias comes about. If you are just referring to who happened to be on the list at the particular time, then this is actually what we call statistical variation, and is quite the opposite of a systematic bias, being rather indicative of a proper random sample. >> Furthermore, if the remainder of users who are not on that list "don't >> care about the future of Scheme", then were they to somehow find their >> preferences on that poll, the only real effect would be a pileup of >> ballots under "don't care", since that is, after all, their defining >> characteristic. It seems that, according to your own description, it >> was quite a good random sample of people who think their opinion matters. > > No. They might not care about the future of scheme, but they might start > caring if you break it for them. As I said previously, if you have code (on a computer, which is prerequisite for any sort of case sensitivity or lack thereof to begin to matter, and if it is in a book, by the time you're done typing it in to a computer it is, well, on a computer), you can fix the case quite easily. So, no, this really doesn't break anything nontrivially. Furthermore, as many people have pointed out, implementations often don't do exactly what the standard says, and are free in a practical sense to implement some sort of compatibility mode, which means that Scheme will be even less "broken". Just make the changes as you need to, and get over it. With my minimal contributions to this discussion, I've already spent more time discussing than I ever expect to spend accommodating the case sensitivity change. Even had I a much larger body of code, I still wouldn't spend much time "fixing" it. Admittedly, my choice of style (more or less all lower case) helps here, but still. Heck, if you'd like, I'll volunteer to switch all of your extant (on a computer) code to all lower-case for symbols just so you won't be bothered. I'll even give you any scripts I use to do it, so that when you pull a book off your shelf and type some bit of code in that has caps in it where it shouldn't, you can just rerun my scripts and bam! it's fixed! You won't ever have to worry about it. At the end of the day, I have a question for you, just to satisfy my curiosity. If you don't use Scheme at work, and don't have time to use it at home, that is, you don't really use it at all and haven't for 15 years, why do you care so fiercely as to make tremendous amounts of noise on this list? And why should the rest of us care what you think? Aren't you the one who keeps claiming that we're disregarding the positions of our "users"? I'm more of a user than you are today by your own admission, regardless of 15 years old history. Shouldn't my opinion, by your own argument, carry infinitely more weight than your own? Regards, Jon _______________________________________________ r6rs-discuss mailing list r6rs-discuss@lists.r6rs.org http://lists.r6rs.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/r6rs-discuss
