[cltl3-devel] wishlist items

[John Cowan]

Robert Uhl scripsit:

> I think that setting *PRINT-CASE* to :DOWNCASE goes a long way to
> soothing the headaches of a language which defaults to
> upcasing...internally everything is upcased but it displays
> attractively.

However, downcasing plays better with Unicode than upcasing does, because
there are many Unicode lower-case letters without upper-case equivalents,
whereas there are no upper-case letters without lower-case equivalents.
The Unicode stability policies guarantee that:

	a string properly downcased in the current version of Unicode
	will remain so in all later versions;

	if two characters form (or do not form) an upper/lowercase pair
	in the current version, they will form (or not form) one in all
	later versions.

--
John Cowan                                   cowan at ccil.org
        "You need a change: try Canada"  "You need a change: try China"
                --fortune cookies opened by a couple that I know