[E-Lang] abort the PassByPRoxy rename

[Mark S. Miller]

At 12:35 AM Friday 3/2/01, Dean Tribble wrote:
>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.).

Agreed.  I'm changing it back.  At this point I'm so inbred in our little 
community's experience building distributed object systems (going back to 
Vulcan and Udanax Gold) that I hadn't noticed, until talking to Dean, that 
"Proxy" really had become the consensus term for this concept in this field 
as a whole, and that Javasoft was confusing themselves as well as everyone 
else when they reused it for an insufficiently related concept.  I also like 
Dean's point:

>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.  

The new inappropriate Javasoft use of "Proxy" is indeed in a place where 
Java novices will never encounter it.


        Cheers,
        --MarkM