This page is part of the web mail archives of SRFI 75 from before July 7th, 2015. The new archives for SRFI 75 contain all messages, not just those from before July 7th, 2015.
It seems petty, to me, to fight over whether "CHAR" describes a low-level thing or a high level thing -- I mean to argue over the names of things to such a degree. If one insists that there is such a principled importance to names that a minority opinion should be extended indefinitely in arguments then one ought to consider if they are fighting the wrong battle: With so many interests and perspectives around the table, perfect agreement on names will always be unlikely. A different open-agenda item -- the sense that a module system is needed, especially one that allows programs to create customized top-level environments in a standardized way importing procedures and data but not necessarily names from other environments -- might be more relevant to the pedantic concerns of naming. Given a portable module system, advocates of one naming aesthetic as opposed to another can compete for mind-share: if one naming aesthetic emerges as best, it can later influence the lower-level parts of the standard. By that time, the superiority of one aesthetic over others will be closer to objectively observable (if there is such a thing, which I doubt). In the meanwhile, when there are disputes about names and any of the editors are convinced -- they can end debate by taking a quick vote among themselves. That's about as good as it'll ever get, imo. At some point (and I'm seeing this in my recent sampling of the thread), discussions like this FAIL in the specific way of devolving into little more than informal rehearsals of "highlighted axioms and theorems of standard Unicode" -- people wind up doing nothing other than reciting well-known dialects and explaining to one another, yet again, that unicode programming is tricky to do well and that there is no single, simple, universal Right Thing. It's very enlightening, I'm sure, for people unfamiliar with Unicode but who are, for some reason, closely following these arguments -- but I don't see how it contributes much to SRFI or R6. (A simple "these names suck and I suggest X because..." and leaving it there in spite of replies in kind would have had as much information conent.) -t