On Wed, May 17, 2017 at 12:07 AM, Arthur A. Gleckler <xxxxxx@speechcode.com> wrote:

I'm reminded of the story from the author of Make that I've heard repeated: When asked why he chose to make the difference between space and tab significant in Make files, he responded that once he realized that it was a mistake, he already had ten users, and he didn't want to break their code.

... And when he first arrived at Google, his desktop keyboard was missing the tab key (or so I was told).

I think, though, that it is not a matter of worrying about backward incompatibility.  I kept the SRFI 60 names rather than switching to better names (and I agree that bits->list etc. are better names) for the sake of backward compatibility, but in fact backward compatibility does not exist.  Fortunately, most of the backward incompatibility with R6RS uses slightly different names both here and in SRFI 143.

So I'm going to switch to bits->list, bits->vector, list->bits, vector->bits, which will fit in better with the "bits" procedure and all the names beginning "bitwise-".  The only remaining outlier name is integer-length, which is sanctioned by ancient tradition back to pre-Common-Lisp days.

-- 
John Cowan          http://vrici.lojban.org/~cowan        xxxxxx@ccil.org
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