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Re: SRFI naming

This page is part of the web mail archives of SRFI discuss from before July 7th, 2015. The new archives for SRFI discuss contain all messages, not just those from before July 7th, 2015.



> From: MJ Ray <markj@cloaked.freeserve.co.uk>
> Alchemy Petrofsky <alchemy@petrofsky.org> wrote:

> > [...] The fundamental problem is the inability to unambiguously refer to a
> > particular SRFI document without having to remember which one of thirty
> > numbers was assigned to the document.
> 
> Do the titles already overlap?

No, but this is not guaranteed by the process, so if you write down
"the 'List Library' SRFI" now, someone reading that next year might be
unable to determine if you were referring to SRFI 1 or SRFI 42.

Furthermore, as I said in the first article in this thread, using the
full titles is both too verbose and unamenable to embedding in an
identifier.  The verbosity problem is the reason that so many
implementation announcements and feature descriptions use the numbers
alone (making many of us unable to make sense of those announcements
without referring to a table).  The identifier problem is the reason
that things like SRFIs 0 and 7, and numerous implementation-dependent
module systems, allow you to refer to SRFI documents in a program by
number, but not by title.

-al