Re: Why Ice-9?

[Andy Wingo]

On Fri 09 Jul 2010 19:59, Noah Lavine <address@hidden> 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...

Andy
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