Settling the singular vs plural library names issue Lassi Kortela (02 Nov 2021 19:12 UTC)
(missing)
Re: [scheme-reports-wg2] Settling the singular vs plural library names issue Dr. Arne Babenhauserheide (02 Nov 2021 23:08 UTC)
Library name aesthetics Lassi Kortela (03 Nov 2021 07:55 UTC)
Re: [scheme-reports-wg2] Library name aesthetics Linas Vepstas (03 Nov 2021 17:47 UTC)

Library name aesthetics Lassi Kortela 03 Nov 2021 07:54 UTC

> Aliases can be easily fit into this.  R7RS could support plural names
> under (rnrs PLURAL (7)) once a minimal versioning system is established;
> SRFI names could be singularized in, say, (srfi SINGULAR), i.e. without
> the SRFI 97 ":...".
>
> Alternatively, R7RS-large could add plural aliases to its (scheme ...)
> namespace for compatibility with R6RS and thus paving a way for a
> possible later deprecation of the singular names in favor of consistency
> (with earlier standards).

Interesting ideas.

Apart from the singular/plural distinction, there's quite a lot of
stylistic difference as well. It would be nice to arrive at a consistent
aesthetic (while retaining backward compatible aliases, as you suggest).

In particular, the following library names from SRFI 97 are very
verbose, probably without adding much clarity. Is "sorting-and-merging"
really clearer than "sort"? Rob Pike railed against "variables whose
names are small essays on their use" in a similar vein, and practical
Scheme programs' import lists tend to get quite long anyway.

basic-string-ports [SRFI 6]
generalized-set! [SRFI 17]
multithreading [SRFI 18]
real-time-multithreading [SRFI 21]
multi-dimensional-arrays [SRFI 25]
basic-format-strings [SRFI 28]
with-shared-structure [SRFI 38]
eager-comprehensions [SRFI 42]
intermediate-format-strings [SRFI 48]
compare-procedures [SRFI 67]
basic-hash-tables [SRFI 69]
lightweight-testing [SRFI 78]
sorting-and-merging [SRFI 95]

I would prefer the following names, which are more in line with the
brevity of RnRS names, and especially R7RS:

string-ports
set!
threads
threads [a second time; the SRFI number disambiguates them]
format
shared
ec [all the identifiers have `ec` in their names]
format [a second time]
compare [all the identifiers have `compare` in their names]
hashtables
testing
sorting

One could argue in detail about "thread" vs "threads" vs "threading".

R6RS uses sub-libraries in a way that R7RS would consider gratuitous:

arithmetic bitwise
arithmetic fixnums
arithmetic flonums
io ports
io simple

but there are so few of them that it's probably not much of an issue.