[cap-talk] Algol-68 and ML terminology

[David Hopwood]

Jonathan S. Shapiro wrote:
> On Thu, 2007-01-18 at 10:34 -0800, Mark S. Miller wrote:
>>Jonathan S. Shapiro wrote:
>>
>>>MarkM, Ping: does the use of the term "reference" in the page correspond
>>>precisely to the use of this term in ML and/or Haskell? It would be very
>>>nice if it did.
>>
>>I thought I knew that the answer to this is "no", but earlier
>>
>>David Hopwood wrote:
>> >>> The use of "reference"
>> >>> here exactly corresponds to the OO language usage).
> 
> Yes. I suppose my question is: does the user of "reference" by the OO
> language community match the use by the ML/Haskell community?

In both ML and Haskell, the term used for a cell is almost always "ref",
rather than "reference". In ML, "ref" is a keyword; in Haskell, "IORef"
and "STRef" are types in the standard library.

On the Haskell wiki (http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/Haskell), searching
for "reference" turned up more uses in the OO sense than in the "cell" sense --
often referring to internals of a Haskell implementation. There were even more
uses in the sense of "reference guide/manual", suggesting that this is not a
commonly used term in the Haskell community, at least if the Haskell wiki is
representative.

(An exception is the page <http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/Library/ArrayRef>,
which is talking about using any of several kinds of *Ref type generically.)

There are no instances of "reference" in this sense in the Haskell 98 report.

Searching comp.lang.functional on Google Groups also does not support the
usage of "reference" for "cell" being common in the functional language
community.

-- 
David Hopwood <david.nospam.hopwood at blueyonder.co.uk>