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>>>>> "Dave" == Dave Mason <dmason@sarg.ryerson.ca> writes: Dave> As another datapoint, there are well over 2000 RFCs and nobody Dave> that I've heard of has a huge problem with that. People know Dave> the ones they care about. I did post earlier that I, at least, have trouble remembering RFCs. As a programmer I quite often need to refer to them... I've written a web server, irc server and email utilities among other things, yet I can't remember the numbers of any involved RFCs. Actually, I can usually remember 2 digits of the number, like IRC I believe is 14xx, and SMTP 28xx? By that measure I should lose all hope of remembering the SRFI numbers once they reach 100 :) I suspect using numbers as unique identifiers is a throw-back to the pre-computer era when indexing and searching archives was a difficult task. Names can be chosen to be just as unique and unambiguous if you resort to a strict convention, for example the Java reverse DNS strategy. Even without computers, the biologists seem to have gotten this right from the start - they've named 1.5-1.8 million species and have never needed to resort to numbers. Of course, the SRFI process already works by numbers, not much sense in trying to change that now. But there's no reason we can't have both. -- Alex