Subject: Re: Stalin is not a cool name ( was: High performance Lisp implementations?) From: Erik Naggum <erik@naggum.no> Date: 1998/11/27 Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp Message-ID: <3121124251099024@naggum.no> * Raymond Toy <toy@rtp.ericsson.se> | "What's in a name? That which we call a rose by any other name would | smell as sweet." according to my memory of my Shakespeare classes of about a decade ago¹, this was a brilliantly ironic expression employed by Shakespeare to refer to the utter stench in the theaters of his time, which got their slang name from the use of huge heaps of flowers to overpower the stench. the lecturer lamented the loss of the strong irony in the modern usage. incidentally, I think calling a compiler "Stalin" is cool. it _could_ be that I've grown used to referring to the extremes in anal retentiveness as "stalinistic", as in "stalinistic typing systems", but it's hard to tell. calling a compiler "Hitler" or "Pol Pot" might cause some valid objections, though. #:Erik ------- ¹ i.e., I wasted a bit of time trying to find a useful reference -- The Microsoft Dating Program -- where do you want to crash tonight?