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Comment by Adlai | Hacker News Reader

It's spelled 'Lisp'. There has been zero overlap between people writing "LISP" and people writing lisp code for about half a century.

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That's really overstating it, especially seeing as Lisp has barely existed for half a century, and people like ESR call it "LISP" to this day.

AFAIK the allcaps "LISP" fell out of favour in 1984 when Common Lisp was introduced, and only the original Lisp implementation and Mac Lisp used the allcaps name.

Much like Fortran (no longer FORTRAN), the acronyms became proper names in their own right.

Someone pointed out that Common Lisp is case-insensitive by default, so really they have no grounds to object to the name LISP. ;-)

The CL reader by default[1] converts unescaped characters to uppercase, but only when parsing tokens. The CL printer by default[2] converts everything it prints to lowercase. CL people seem to adopt these conventions as well, although they have been known to :capitalize Lisp on occasion.

[1] http://l1sp.org/cl/2.2

[2] http://l1sp.org/cl/*print-case*

    CL-USER 30 > (eq '|LISP| '|Lisp|)
    NIL

Common Lisp knows very well the difference between LISP and Lisp

English is the relevant rule set here, not Lisp :)

You're wrong, and you need to get off your high horse. People use "LISP" when referring to the general family of LISP-like languages. And people that do this tend to know about Common Lisp. That's why they do this.

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