Why "Beta" and "Beta'", not "beta" and "Beta"? (Following e.g. Latex.) It seems like it would be useful to be able to define identifiers like "Φ'" (though maybe that's "Phi''"). It also seems a bit inconsistent to not allow an identifier π to be defined - some people use the symbol π for other purposes.
That's a bad idea - every system that is case insensitive has eventually regretted it because it just leads to confusion. E.g. Mac's filesystem, Cmake (https://stackoverflow.com/a/35034125/265521). Almost all modern languages are fully case sensitive.
I've been making languages for quite a while now. And between all of them I've really like the idea of case insensitivity. Nota is mostly about what I wanted to have and couldn't find in other places. It's way of identifiers too was an important thing that I wanted to have. Having apostrophes, case insensitivity and spaces was an important thing that actually even effected the rest of the grammar design
I think what you've done is very beautiful and I hope you'll accept some feedback with equanimity.
You haven't made a language here, you have implemented one. That language is mathematical "Nota"tion.
You've implemented it incorrectly, because mathematical notation is case sensitive. A doesn't mean a, any more than it means α.
It is, of course, your project, and your sense of aesthetics which must ultimately be satisfied. I hope you will consider what I and others are trying to communicate to you, because I would use this, if it weren't broken from my perspective.
It is not that I don’t like or respect your ideas. Truth is that what I ultimately wanted on my end was to do the challenge of rendering notations with Unicode and then I thought let’s have a simple calculator with it. Nota is not a super capable calculator, to what I see it’s only the bare minimum. It’s for the times when you need quick thinking and wanna do a few quick calculations.
I personally love case insensitivity because it is really hard for me to remember the cases. I love macOS for its case insensitive file format and each time I design a language—and Nota is not mathematical notation, it is its own language with its own grammar. Just like the way Mathematica is its own language—I seek to see if having case insensitivity is possible. I loved it that with Nota, because the language was so simple I could even have spaces in the names. These are awesome for quick doings.
I haven’t resisted to the idea of case sensitivity though. But to be honest never thought about it.
For the sake of beauty nota renders each word in first-letter-Upper/rest-Lower since this was the most beautiful representation I experimented with. I will add the A and A’ to have both a and A (and the rest of the letters) this was if someone really loves to have the distinguished cases they can and I can keep my easy to write and beautiful in print style.
I think this solution is the win-win. And also I think if you regard Nota as a separate language with separate ideas; You can have more fun with it. It’s like watching How I met your Mother and trying to use it to replace Friends, it’ll make a bad experience, but regard it as a its own series and you then can see its beauty
I feel like case insensitivity is a great UX choice, really everything should be case insensitive. It just falls so badly apart when you get into the guts of things that case sensitivity is the only practical choice.
