[E-Lang] abort the PassByPRoxy rename

[Dean Tribble]

At 11:41 AM 2/27/2001, Mark S. Miller wrote:
>Note before reading on: "PassByRelay" is E's new term for "PassByProxy".
>Java 1.3 has used up the term "Proxy" for an unrelated concept.  PassByRelay
>is the default in E, as contrasted with PassByCopy or PassByConstruction.
>All the discussion so far has assumed that Alice, Bob, and Carol are
>PassByRelay, and we continue with that assumption.

I strongly recommend aborting this incipient name change.  "Proxy" is a 
well established word for use in remote objects (RMI, CORBA, OOPSLA, Design 
Patterns, etc.).  *Not* using it would confuse anyone actually trying to 
understand the implementation of communication, because they would be left 
wondering what was different from traditional proxies (undermining trust, 
confidence, etc.).  Also, people have long used "proxy" in multiple ways 
without confusion ("he's my proxy for the meeting", "I'm going through a 
Web proxy", proxy voting, etc.) with no particular confusion, so as long as 
the classes aren't just the bare word "Proxy", the name is fine.  From the 
perspective of novices, if they are anywhere near the (poorly but not 
entirely inappropriately named) "Proxy" classes from Java, they are already 
way out of their depth.  Therefore, adding confusion to the world of the 
people that need to do the hard stuff buys little if anything for novices.

BTW I will happily flame^H^H^H^H^H^H further explain to anyone not 
completely convinced of this.

:-)

dean