[Ecls-list] Case woes

[Juan Jose Garcia Ripoll]

Hi,

I have fixed a couple of things in ECL regarding the effect of readtable 
and print cases in the printing and reading of symbols. In particular

+ The capitalization now takes into account possible spaces, hyphens, 
etc in the symbol name.

+ The value of +print-escape+/+print-readably+ determine that the output 
should be such that if read with the standard readtable one recovers the 
same symbol. In practice this means one has to escape symbols which have 
lowercase letters in some cases.

+ What most puzzles me is the issue of packages. To ensure read/write 
consistency, an implementation has to analyze the effect of 
readtable/print-case in the name of the package and of the symbol either 
separately or jointly. Consider for instance the case of readtable case 
being :invert

           package name      symbol name
           ------------      -----------
foo:FAA       foo               FAA
foo:FAA       FOO               faa

In the first case, the whole of the token is analyzed and it is found 
that there is not a common case. In the second case, the token is 
actually analyzed as being made of two, and the :invert process is 
applied to each of the component.

If one follows the reader algorithm the first option should be the one. 
However, most implementations use the second algorithm, probably because 
it is more intuitively clear to the user. Also, it has the potential of, 
as an extension to ANSI, allowing us to specify a syntax for the symbol 
name, or use nested packages, etc, etc.

I have also taken the second option when fixing ECL's parser.

Juanjo