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higepon wrote at 07/06/2008 05:51 AM:
How about following names? (getenv) and (environ) or (getenv) and (environ->alist)
The difficulty I'm having with good names for these procedures is that "environment" and "variable" both have special meaning in Scheme, and indeed are central to it.
And, as a general language rather than a Unix scripting language, I would argue that Posix environment variables are not important enough that should claim the identifier "environ".
One reasonable concession to the scripting people, in my opinion, would be to use "getenv" for the function of getting a particular environment variable, and to have a more long-winded name for getting an alist of all environment variables.
The extreme would be something like: get-host-process-environment-variable-value get-alist-of-host-process-environment-variable-names-and-values Referring to Posix would disambiguate "environment", so we could do: posix-environment-value posix-environment-map posix-value posix-environmentOr, as long as we're saying "posix", we can just use the Posix names (I'm not sure all these are strictly Posix):
posix-getenv posix-environ posix-putenv posix-setenv posix-unsetenvSome Scheme implementations or libraries might provide the full fleet of Posix identifiers without qualifying their names with "posix-" or "posix:", for use by people using Scheme for Unix systems programming or shell scripting. However, for the default names that we'd like Scheme implementations and programmers to use, I think that names that don't stomp on the term "environment" (nor "variable" nor "value") would be best.
-- http://www.neilvandyke.org/