The Haskell Cabal
A Common Architecture for Building Applications and Tools
As well as being the name of a package, Cabal, the name of an executable cabal (from the cabal-install package), it is also an acronym. Why do we not ever write the acronym capitalized as CABAL and should we start?
Typically, acronyms and initialisms are written in all capital letters to distinguish them from ordinary words.
An acronym is pronounced as a single word, rather than as a series of letters. NASA, for instance, is an acronym. Grammarly: Abbreviation Rules
Cabal: Common Architecture for Building Applications and Libraries
Back to the main question, I think we should keep using Cabal and cabal instead of changing it to CABAL simply because changing things always has a cost.
Furthermore, I don’t think we should associate different meanings with different capitalizations of the name (e.g. Cabal vs. cabal) nor require special formatting and punctuation (e.g. .cabal file). If you do want to disambiguate, do so in text. Since the cabal package format is way more popular and older than the project format, I’d think most people would think of the package format when you say “cabal file”. If you want to be completely unambiguous, you can say “cabal package file”.
Capitalising CABAL to refer to the architecture in the docs might be helpful. We’re not about to change the case of package names or components of packages. This is not a breaking change within the architecture.