>>>>> "Dave" == Dave Mason <xxxxxx@sarg.ryerson.ca> writes:

    Dave> As another datapoint, there are well over 2000 RFCs and nobody
    Dave> that I've heard of has a huge problem with that.  People know
    Dave> the ones they care about.

I did post earlier that I, at least, have trouble remembering RFCs.  As
a programmer I quite often need to refer to them... I've written a web
server, irc server and email utilities among other things, yet I can't
remember the numbers of any involved RFCs.  Actually, I can usually
remember 2 digits of the number, like IRC I believe is 14xx, and SMTP
28xx?  By that measure I should lose all hope of remembering the SRFI
numbers once they reach 100 :)

I suspect using numbers as unique identifiers is a throw-back to the
pre-computer era when indexing and searching archives was a difficult
task.  Names can be chosen to be just as unique and unambiguous if you
resort to a strict convention, for example the Java reverse DNS
strategy.  Even without computers, the biologists seem to have gotten
this right from the start - they've named 1.5-1.8 million species and
have never needed to resort to numbers.

Of course, the SRFI process already works by numbers, not much sense in
trying to change that now.  But there's no reason we can't have both.

--
Alex