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> From: sperber@informatik.uni-tuebingen.de (Michael Sperber [Mr. Preprocessor]) > >>>>> "al" == Alpine Petrofsky <alpine@petrofsky.org> writes: > al> They are the shortname serial numbers. Did you ever read the message > al> that started this thread? > > Yes, I did. I'm sorry if I expressed myself poorly: I know what it's > supposed to mean, but I fail to see how it's easier to rememember than > the SRFI serial number. I'll try answering that again. I have a much easier time remembering whether something was numbered 1 or 2 than I do trying to remember whether it was numbered 1 or 2 or 3 or 4 ..... or 97. Suppose that SRFIs had been published as RFCs, and instead of talking about SRFIs 1, 7, and 11, we called them RFCs 2503, 2641, and 3177. Suppose that the only standard scheme for referring to these documents in programs used the identifers rfc-2503, rfc-2641, and rfc-3177. Now suppose I proposed that we be able to also call these rfc-srfi-1, rfc-srfi-7, and rfc-srfi-11, because I found those names to be easier for the writer to remember, and easier for the reader to comprehend. My shortnames proposal is along the same lines as that hypothetical proposal. We take a large serially-numbered collection of somewhat related things, and extract a much smaller collection of more closely related things. The numbers used to distinguish among the members of the much smaller collection are much smaller numbers, and thus much easier to remember. The smaller collection is distinguished from the rest of the larger collection by a non-numeric name. > al> I'm not suggesting that a library system would need to support the > al> name string-lib as the name for a library that implemented SRFI 13. > al> I'm only suggesting that if a system allows you to refer in some way > al> to SRFI 13 with the identifier srfi-13, that it should also allow you > al> to refer to it as srfi-string-lib-1. > > I still don't get it. What's preventing you from using any name you like? I can use the name "Snookums", or any name I like, to refer to the 43rd U.S. president, but I can't expect anyone to understand me because "Snookums" is not a publicly-recognized name for him. Fortunately, our presidents do have recognized names, and the identifier bush-2 suffices to distinguish him from all past and future presidents. (Note that the names clinton-1 and bush-2, even though they are not at all descriptive, are much easier to remember than 42 and 43. Also, even though presidents johnson-1 and johnson-2 have no particular connection to each other, these names are still superior to 17 and 36.) -al