On Mon, 13 Dec 2004 21:34:28 +0000 (UTC), A.Sloman@cs.bham.ac.uk
wrote:
>
>Steve,
>
>> What are the standard spellings for terms such as Poplog, Pop-11 and so on?
>> And is there a HELP file where this is described? My first stop was
>> REF STANDARDS but I didn't see anything quite right there.
>
>The standard is that there is no standard, though there might have been
>at some point in the past
(big snip)
>Does anything hang on it?
On purely linguistic grounds, since Poplog is a name and not an
acronym, I think it should be treated like a proper noun. In
english, this would imply lowercase with an initial capital,
as above. Like "England" or "Bristol" or "Steve".
I sometimes write Pop11, but the glyphs for "1" and "l" look
very similar in many typefaces (aka, incorrectly, fonts), so
there is some merit in setting off the numeric suffix with
a hyphen, as in Pop-11. I confess that I tend to write the
whole thing lowercase, as in "pop11" which is incorrect by
normal english practice.
Why not rename it <g>? Since the 11 is essentially meaningless
nowadays anyway. (Hands up all those who know *why* it is 11? <g>)
My proposal for a new name: we should call the language Anictus.
I'll explain why, later.
It's actually probably about pop4.805, depending on whether you
include Wonderpop in its ancestry or not ... or perhaps pop-83
revision 15, or something.
I seem to remember a time when Aaron proposed calling it "Sussex
Basic" ... <g>
Hmmm. How about PIL (Poplog Implementation Language)?
Or, here's another idea, we could call it:
People's Open-stack Programming Language and Libraries
or POPLL for short.
Any other suggestions?
We could also keep the current name, and write it as Pop-11,
or Pop11 or POP11 or whatever according to the whim of the
moment. Or we could have a pop11 poll, and choose the
preferred variant. (All this looks a lot sillier in Courier,
where the 11 and ll are indistinguishable, BTW.)
Why Anictus? Well, Anicetus was the eleventh Pope, or Pope-11 if
you like. What do you get if you remove the "e" from Pope-11 ?
Jonathan
--
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