Re: Why Ice-9?

[Andreas Rottmann <a.rottmann@gmx.at>]

Andy Wingo <wingo@pobox.com> writes:

> On Fri 09 Jul 2010 19:59, Noah Lavine <noah.b.lavine@gmail.com> writes:
>
>> I am not completely sure this is the right place to ask this, but why
>> do many of the module names in Guile start with 'ice-9'?
>>
>> I can tell you that as a newcomer this is quite unintuitive.
>
> Heh, I thought that too, once. 
>
>   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ice-nine
>
> The idea at the time (1998 or so) was that Guile's module system would
> crystallize the mass of Scheme code out there. It didn't happen exactly
> like that; in practice ice-9 is Guile's namespace.
>
> Now, there is a deeper issue here -- a global Scheme namespace is
> starting to emerge, and Guile is a bit all over the map. To me it's fine
> to have e.g. statprof have the toplevel module, (statprof), even though
> it's part of Guile; but in a way I feel that instead of having ice-9 and
> system, we should just have (guile) as our module prefix, in the same
> way that e.g. ikarus and chez scheme have (ikarus ...) and (chezscheme
> ...), respectively.
>
> It's too late to do that this cycle, but perhaps during 2.0 or for 2.2
> we could provide (ice-9 popen) as an alias to (guile popen), and
> eventually for 2.4 deprecate both ice-9 and system. Just a thought,
> though...
>
+1 for that idea from me.

Rotty
-- 
Andreas Rottmann -- <http://rotty.yi.org/>