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(TLA = "three letter acronym/abbreviation":-)

abbreviations we try to use pervasively in the system

As Dan Barlow pointed out long ago on the mailing list, unabbreviated

names are easier to deal with than abbreviated names, because you

never need to remember what abbreviation to use. That's true, but in a

language like Lisp which depends on compound names for important

things like structure accessors, that can lead to painful names like

MAKE-EXTERNAL-ENTRY-POINT-LAMBDA-EXPRESSION and associated indenting

confusion.

In an effort to have some of the best of both worlds, I've attempted

to impose standard abbreviations for some things. Ideally, you don't

need to remember whether to abbreviate it, or what abbreviation to

use, because it's always the same abbreviation.

Some of these already were used pretty consistently in CMU CL.

Others not so much, but in sbcl-0.7.0 I put some effort into

making them more consistent.

ARG argument

DX dynamic-extent

FUN function

GC garbage collect(ion)

N new: number, as in e.g. N-PASSES or N-WORD-BITS

old: conventional prefix for temporary variables used to

implement evaluate-only-once semantics in macros

NLE non-local entry

NLX non-local exit (in compiler IR2)

SB storage base (in compiler IR2)

SC storage class (in compiler IR2)

TN temporary name (?) (in compiler IR2)

VAR variable (in the lisp entity "noun" sense, not in the

adjectival sense)

XEP external entry point

Making them even more consistent (within the limits of ANSI and

MOP compatibility) would probably be good.