I have an odd suggestion for a naming convention for these things: call
them "texprs", with submodules "curly-texprs", "whitespace-texprs", and
"function-texprs". (I dislike the name "modern-expressions" because
standard functional notation is rather old, which is what makes it seem so
natural.)
There are several reasons why I want to call these things "t-exprs".
First, "t" comes after "s" in the alphabet, so it seems natural to call an
augmentation, and potentially a second-generation, of s-exprs "t-exprs".
This happens all the time in mathematics: x, y, and z for variables; z, w
for complex variables (x and y are often taken by real and imaginary parts,
and there's a need to "wrap around" as well); a, b, c for constants; f, g
and h for functions; R, S, T for rings; p, q for prime ideals; and so forth.
Second, I'd like to create a "cleaned up" version of Common Lisp someday,
starting with "t-exprs"; I'd like to call the language "Treehouse" to give
it an interesting name, and to emphasise the fact that its basic data
structure is trees, made out of lists. (The motivation behind this is the
article "The Nature of Lisp", http://www.defmacro.org/ramblings/lisp.html,
as well as a desire to find a "hip" name for the language--everyone likes
treehouses!)
Third, "s-exprs" is short for "symbolic expressions"; "m-exprs" is short
for "meta expressions"; when we call these things "sweet-expressions",
what's an appropriate abbreviation? Perhaps "sw-exprs" would do, or just
"w-exprs", or even "t-exprs" for "sweeT-EXPRessions". I don't know how
many times I wish I could have said "t-exprs" instead of
"sweet-expressions" in an e-mail.
As an observation, since the goal is for these things to be readable, it
wouldn't hurt to call them "r-exprs", short for "readable expressions";
this last name would also fit nicely in the alphabet scheme, even though
"R" comes before "S". (And yes, that has a lot of tradition in
mathematics, as well--usually when you run out of letters.) Having said
that, I'm still partial to the term "t-exprs".
On Fri, Jul 20, 2012 at 11:13 AM, David A. Wheeler <dwhee...@dwheeler.com>wrote:
> Kartik Agaram:
> >
> > "readable" seems generic. How about 'sweetexpr'?
>
> The problem is that sweet-expressions are only one of 3 tiers. Some
> people will not adopt the whole tier, but if they can accept curly-infix,
> that's still an improvement. I very much intend for people to be able to
> adopt any one of the 3, to the extent we can. Besides, the name of the
> whole project is "readable" anyway.
>
> I suggest this nomenclature:
> * "readable" = the name of this overall project
> * "readable-discuss" = the name of this mailing list
> * "readable Wiki" = the name of this project's Wiki
> * "read" = the name of the Scheme/CL/etc. function we're trying to
> replace. R6RS thinks it's called "get-datum" :-).
>
> --- David A. Wheeler
>
>
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