Re: Apologia for bzr

[Stefan Monnier]

> Conceivably we could rename "window" to "pane" and "frame" to "window".
> I think the two renamings would have to be done in two different releases,
> perhaps a year or two apart.

Yup, it'd have to be a many-steps process:
- first, rename "window" to "pane"
- then rename "frame" to "window" (so frames would have 3 names:
  screens, frames, and windows; tho admittedly we did finally get rid of
  the "screen" aliases a few years ago).

With a distinction between the Texinfo+docstring level and the Elisp
code level.

At the Lisp level, after renaming selected-window to selected-pane, we'd
have to wait for the selected-window compatibility alias to disappear
before we can rename selected-frame to selected-window.  I'd estimate
that getting rid of the selected-window compatibility alias would take at
least 20 years.

This said, the "what you call a window is called a frame" is not nearly
as problematic as "what we call window is not what you think", so maybe
renaming "window" to "pane" would get us most of the benefit.

So maybe the first step is the only one that really matters, and maybe
my grand children can consider the second step when their time comes.

I'm not sure how much change that represents, but if someone wants to
take a stab at it... I'd be interested to see what it looks like.


        Stefan