On 1 Mar 2013, Richard Fateman verbalised:
> Yes.
> 1. Joel Moses preferred a shorter name for the program that
> he was typing many times. It also makes the text of the
> source code shorter.
But it would be even shorter, if m2 were a real alias for
schatchen. Then you wouldn't need the third argument, which is
always nil in the code. :-)
> 2. Nevertheless, he liked the name schatchen which is a Yiddish term for
> a marriage broker or matchhmaker.
>
> There are other puns in Moses' work. His thesis program on
> symbolic integration was named SIN; partly a reaction to James
> Slagle's earlier work called SAINT.
> Anyway, Moses liked to title his lectures "Moses speaks on SIN"
>
> (other insight into short program names..)
> There was an advantage on the PDP-6/10 lisp system to keeping
> your symbol names at 6 or fewer letters, since then the print
> name fit in one 36-bit word and the symbol table would be
> smaller.
>
> Macsyma on the PDP 6 including the operating system, fit
> an address space of 2^18 words each 36 bits.
> Less than 1.2 megabytes.
Thanks for the historical tidbits.
Andreas
--
ceterum censeo redmondinem esse delendam.