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Typeability and screen space
I don't buy your arguments, Carl. I still think that we should only have
the long forms without abbreviations (although we can try to keep the "long
forms" from being too long", which is one reason I prefer "ref" to
"fully-qualified-name".
-- I think that typeability should NOT be an issue here. We are almost never
going to type these things. (Even for the documentation, we can take
output from the code.) Readability is MUCH more important than typeability.
I may forget whether S stands for Subject, Signature, SPKI-version, or what,
and don't want to have to look it up.
-- While you are right that some programming systems have over-long names,
we only have a handful of such names here, and we can choose them
carefully.
-- Screen space is NOT an issue, because it is essentially the same issue
as for the general compression (we are probably only going to save 15%
at most for total bytes with the short forms). Furthermore, for screen
display you probably want it nicely idented, which means that you will
care more about lines of display rather than number of bytes anyway, and
the increase in the number of lines displayed is probably going to be
under 5% for typical stuff...
I still vote for a single form for each object name...
Ron Rivest
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