more on terminology

[Kent M Pitman <KMP @ MIT-MC>]

    Date: Tue, 16 Oct 1984  19:28 EDT
    From: Steven <Handerson at CMU-CS-C.ARPA>

    Actually, I disagree with the terminology.  "Event" is fine.
    However, you're presuming that there will be a "condition object"
    associated with a particular event, and I think there may be some
    other issues we need to get through first.  I think condition should
    be reserved to mean "an event deemed interesting by CL".  That way,
    we can talk about whether an event is a condition or not.  I also
    think less-common word should be used for the things that may
    eventually be created - perhaps the phrase "condition object" or
    somesuch (we don't need to agree what this is yet).  One would then
    signal conditions, not events...

Actually, I don't think we disagree on this. This is certainly a
restatement of what I intended to say. If it makes it clearer to
rephrase it this way, I'm happy.

The reason I had proposed eliminating the word "event" was that I
thought it presupposed the existence of objects representing conditions
and I wanted to avoid terminology that forced an object-oriented view of
error handling. Indeed, I think that "condition" is a fine name for what
the LispM documentation calls "events" and I agree that if we ever adopt
an object-oriented view, we should call the objects which represent
conditions "condition objects".

The word "event" is too generic to lock down for any use even so specific
as condition raising, which is another reason I wanted to free it. I don't
think it is fair to assign it technical meaning.
-kmp