REBOL Technologies

Homing in on the REBOL/Services TLA

Carl Sassenrath, CTO
REBOL Technologies
14-Mar-2005 20:14 GMT
Article #0138
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As REBOL/Services closes in on its first prototype release (Alpha 1), it's also time to pick the final TLA three letter acronym (TLA). In blog 0105 I asked for your help in naming the TLA, and I received a good number of suggestions. I would like to thank you all for sending them to me.

Let me briefly summarize the purpose of using a TLA for REBOL/Service (since in general I do not like TLA's and try to avoid them whenever possible). But, the reasons are quite simple:

  1. Although REBOL/Services is the official name, we don't want to have to write that every time we refer to it.
  2. We want something that is short enough to be used as a file directory name (it is likely that there will be many files put there in the future).
  3. It might also get used as a prefix or a suffix in other places, either for variable names, object contexts, etc. Here again shorter is better.

Further requirements of the TLA are:

  1. It must be a valid directory name. For instance, the CVS (source archive) will use this name. So, this requirement ruled out using R/S, which was one of my favorite choices.
  2. It must be searchable on Google (and other engines), and there must be a good chance of finding it near the top of the search results. This again ruled out R/S and also acronyms like RSA (an encryption method), RSX (a sports car model), SSA (social security, in USA) which we would never be able to surpass on Google.
  3. It should not have a bad meaning or connotation in any language (that we know of).

Although it is not a requirement that the TLA must contain the word REBOL, it may be a good idea to include it because REBOL/Services takes advantage of the dialecting method of relative expressions, not only for the data but for the metadata and descriptive levels as well. This is much more difficult to do without the dialecting methodology of REBOL. I realize there was a lot of discussion about not putting REBOL in the name to make it more general and adoptable. I understand and appreciate that consideration.

In my next blog, I will list the acronyms that have been suggested so far, and we can take a look at which ones would work best based on the above requirements.

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