[gambit-list] What's in a name?

Harold Ancell hga at ancell-ent.com
Sat Aug 18 11:55:50 EDT 2007


At 10:16 AM 8/18/2007, Marc Feeley wrote:

>On 18-Aug-07, at 10:39 AM, Harold Ancell wrote:

>>We also need a name for what we've got, the R5RS based
>>implementations that will at most have a R6RS compatibility package
>>(the route Larceny and Gauche will be taking).
>>
>>I've been using "UncommonScheme" as a working name; I don't dislike
>>Common Lisp per se, but there's reasons I switched....
>
>The name that comes to mind first is "Schemer".  That's the original  
>name for the Scheme language.

Yeah!  The sequence was:

  Planner and Micro Planner (the latter used by SHRDLU)
  Conniver ("Don't Plan, Connive!")
  Schemer ("Don't Connive, Scheme!")

All were Sussman (and others) and later Steele trying to interpret
and implement Carl Hewitt's ideas.

>The "R" at the end was dropped because the file system was limited
>to 6 characters.

Yep, ITS used the 6 bit character set of the PDP-6/10s (6 * 6 = 36
bit word size; DEC consulted with the AI Lab about the architecture
and instruction set, so two 18 bit word addressed pointers (1 Grand
^_^ one megabyte of address space) made one word, these were the
first "Lisp Machines").  ITS had a DIRNAM; FLNAME VERSIN scheme (so
to speak), the last was normally a number auto-incremented by EMACS.

So Schemer was truncated to SCHEME or now Scheme.

Schemer, yes, let's reach back to our roots.

No need to gratuitously insult Common Lisp and its users, it has
its place.

>I also like the ring of "The Language Formerly Known As Scheme" (perhaps
>because I love Monty Python).

As do I.  And if any group of people should provide the name for
this ... silly walk? ... it should be them.

And there's also the artist formerly known as "The Artist Formerly
Known As Prince" (when he wanted to get out of a recording label
contract), which will comer to mind to a set of music fans, and was
forced by something both dire and silly.

                                        - Harold




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