Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!mcvax!ukc!its63b!aiva!jeff
From: jeff@aiva.ed.ac.uk (Jeff Dalton)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp
Subject: Re: Why ``Flavors'' ?
Message-ID: <359@aiva.ed.ac.uk>
Date: 20 Apr 88 16:49:10 GMT
References: <442@crin.crin.fr>
Reply-To: jeff@uk.ac.ed.aiva (Jeff Dalton)
Organization: Dept. of AI, Univ. of Edinburgh, UK
Lines: 24

In article <442@crin.crin.fr> masini@crin.crin.fr (Gerald MASINI) writes:
>For some article I am currently writing, I would like to know the genesis
>of the name ``Flavors'', and why precisely ``vanilla'' has been chosen as
>the name of the more general class ?

Think of ice cream.  Vanilla is an "ordinary flavor".  This use of
"vanilla" is fairly general, and not confined to ice cream and object
systems.  One might say, for example, "vanilla Common Lisp code" to
describe some code that didn't contain anything tricky or particularly
interesting.  So "vanilla" just means "ordinary".

The ice cream image is useful, though, because it also might serve to
explain "mixins" (as in "mixin flavors").  In Massachusetts (and perhaps
other parts of the US), there are places that offer to mix various things
into ice cream.  This is not the same as, say, chocolate chip ice cream
where something is already mixed in -- you get to pick the ice cream flavor
and the "mixin" independently.

I don't know that this is in fact the correct explanation for the use
of "mixin" in flavors, but it seems a likely one.

Jeff Dalton,                      JANET: J.Dalton@uk.ac.ed             
AI Applications Institute,        ARPA:  J.Dalton%uk.ac.ed@nss.cs.ucl.ac.uk
Edinburgh University.             UUCP:  ...!ukc!ed.ac.uk!J.Dalton