Guidelines

["Scott E. Fahlman" <Fahlman@C.CS.CMU.EDU>]

"Constitution" is a bit too strong, but I view these guidelines as
something that we or others in the design discussions can point to and
say "Look, this proposed change is too radical according to the
guidelines we have adopted."  That doesn't mean we don't do it, but it
does mean that anyone proposing to violate the guidelines must make a
convincing case why it is justified.  So the idea is more or less to set
a default level of conservatism that we all agree to, more or less.
Without this, we'd have someone like Fry arguing that we should
rationalize all the function names in order to make them look better.

-- Scott