Library namespaces (guile ...) and (srfi ...)

[Lassi Kortela]

> Aliasing (ice-9 *) to (guile *) for avoiding the "what's that none
> standard ice-9 library?".

Sounds reasonable. "What is ice, and why version 9?"

> Also (srfi srfi-N) with something meaninful
> for humans that don't want to lookup srfi.schemers.org or keep a
> cheatsheet on their desk.  e.g., (srfi srfi-1) => (srfi list) or
> something like that.

This should be done Scheme-community-wide. There are existing 
discussions which have pretty much covered all the bases. But the 
resulting proposals have so far not been merged.

AFAIK the original proposal was SRFI 97. It is contentious because it 
prefixes numbers with colons. E.g. (srfi :1 lists).

R7RS standardizes the more natural (srfi 1) but does not mention 
anything about the mnemonic (srfi 1 lists) format.

So each gets one part right and the other part wrong.

There is also a debate about singular vs plural names. The R6RS camp 
tends to use plural, the R7RS camp singular. I looked into this once, 
and there are fewer singular names than plural names, so it might be 
easier to switch most stuff to plural (aliasing existing names).

Finally, SRFI 97 uses excessively verbose names in some cases. I 
suggested shorter names at 
https://htmlpreview.github.io/?https://github.com/pre-srfi/consistent-library-names/blob/master/survey.html 
but so far there has been no uptake.

There have been a few threads about the topic on the SRFI mailing lists. 
The latest one is 
https://srfi-email.schemers.org/srfi-discuss/msg/22363692/. The SRFI 97 
mailing list archive is at https://srfi-email.schemers.org/srfi-97/.