LISP vs Lisp

Hey,
I'm trying to convince ESR to use Lisp instead of LISP in the hacker howto. However, I can't find any citation to why Lisp refers to modern dialects, and LISP to old ones.

Any help?

Now that I think about it, I don't think I have seen a citation as such as to why. Two major reasons came to mind. First, LISP comes from time of all caps terminals, and modern dialect obviously do not, and their names are all spelled as Lisp (Common Lisp, Emacs Lisp). Second, LISP is an acronym of LISt Processing, and modern dialects are not particularly specialized for processing lists.

In the hacker howto the first occurrence of Lisp is spelled 'Lisp', but all latter ones as 'LISP'. Perhaps ESR just doesn't attach meaning to capitalization of programming languages names.

Malaclypse wrote:Hey,
I'm trying to convince ESR to use Lisp instead of LISP in the hacker howto. However, I can't find any citation to why Lisp refers to modern dialects, and LISP to old ones.

I don't think the difference is related to language versions. It's rather a matter of the current orthography. It seems ESR has already used “Lisp” once, perhaps in a recently edited portion of the howto.

Thanks!

I've just always been slapped over the fingers to use "Lisp" instead of "LISP" when talking about modern Lisp.
I suppose I'm just overly obsessed with semantics. ^^

I don't know that this is anything other than a modern usage question. In the old days, everything was written in caps and the names of most computer languages were abbreviations and acronyms of some sort (LISP, BASIC, ALGOL, FORTRAN, COBOL, etc.). I think the all-caps versions of these went by the wayside when we discovered that computers were perfectly capable of dealing with lowercase letters and caps were seen as "screaming" in text messages. Unix was sort of the over-rotation to everything being done in lowercase.

So, no, I don't think it has anything to do with whether a Lisp is a "modern Lisp" or an "old Lisp" of some sort. IMO, "LISP" is just a correct as "Lisp," and arguably more-so, only it looks archaic and dated.

Actually i do get annoyed by screaminess of all-caps words. I sometimes do use it for variables, but i wish there was a better way to be clear about it without going all-caps. Maybe i will try $variable, and $#'function, in writing or something like that.. It is a childish objection though, i was also uncomfortable with using $#'or as $#'if-use, a macro i wrote that is essentially synominous.

I've read explanations that titles like LISP, FORTRAN etc come from archaic era when you could only punch capital letter on punch cards.

dmitry_vk wrote:I've read explanations that titles like LISP, FORTRAN etc come from archaic era when you could only punch capital letter on punch cards.

I think that's correlated but not causal. That is, I think they do derive from an era where everybody programmed in capital letters (I started using nothing but caps until the 1980s), but both FORTRAN and LISP are acronyms for FORmula TRANslation and LISt Processing. ALGOL was short for ALGOrithmic Language. COBOL was COmmon Business Oriented Language. In short, using acronyms to name computer languages was all the rage, and they all used all-caps renderings for their names.

It's the same reasoning as "UNIX" -- the correct spelling, in printed material, has always been "Lisp", "Unix", etc., but it used to be all the rage to typeset these things in small-caps (Lɪꜱᴘ), which was mistaken for all-caps...