Out of curiosity, do anybody know why Plan9 designers chose lowercase variables over uppercase ones?
At first, given the different conventions between rc and sh (eg $path is an array, while $PATH is a string), I supposed Plan 9 designers wanted to prevent conflict with unix tools relying to the older conventions. However, I'm not sure this was the main reason, as this also open to subtle issues: if a unix shell modifies $IFS and then invoke an rc script, such script will ignore the change and keep using the previous $ifs. As far as I can see, APE does not attempt any translation between the two conventions, so maybe I'm just missing something obvious... Do anyone know what considerations led to such design decision? Giacomo
