We’ve made a change to Plasma’s syntax, removing any case sensitivity in the grammar. This doesn’t mean that identifiers are matched in a case insensitive way such as:

var MYVAR = "Hello"
print!(myvar)

That wouldn’t help anyone. Instead it means that the concept of case has been removed from the language’s grammar, so:

type my_type = ...

and

type MyType = ...

are now both legal. Previously we required all types to begin with lowercase letters and type variables to begin with upper case letters.

Removing this type of case significance is important for people whose spoken language does not have case in it’s writing system - such as Chinese (Mandarin, Cantonese etc) with the largest number of speakers. Without this change, they would have been unable to write type names.

Type variables and type names still need to be distinct (or add extra syntax like C++ does) to avoid ambiguities in the language. We’ve chosen to use an apostrophe (') to identify type variables as OCaml does, like:

type List('x) = Nil
              | Cons('x, List('x))

This makes type expressions unambiguous. But there was also ambiguity within match statements: an identifier within a match statement may be a data constructor or a new variable. Previously data constructors begun with a capital letter, like Nil and Cons above; and variables with a lower-case letter. We’ve changed Plasma to require the var keyword to introduce new variables in patterns (existing variables can’t be used here). An identifier without this keyword must now be a data constructor.

func map(f : func('x) -> ('y), l : List('x)) -> List('y) {
   match (l) {
      [] ->               { return [] }
      [var x | var xs] -> { return [f(x) | map(f, xs)] }
   }
}

This has the side-benefit of bringing the syntax closer to always introducing new variables with the var keyword - the only time they’re not is in function parameter lists.

The new syntax could lead to some longer code lines, particularly in pattern matching. But we hope that the new inclusive syntax is worth it.

Edit 2020-05-20: I’ve written about this in more detail, including some of the other options a language may have on my personal blog.