CABAL, the acronym

#1

As for disambiguating terms in the Cabal Users Guide, cabal#9976.

The final proposal for Cabal leads with:

The Haskell Cabal
A Common Architecture for Building Applications and Tools

As well as being the name of a package, Cabal, the name of an executable cabal (from the cabal-install package), it is also an acronym. Why do we not ever write the acronym capitalized as CABAL and should we start?

Typically, acronyms and initialisms are written in all capital letters to distinguish them from ordinary words.

An acronym is pronounced as a single word, rather than as a series of letters. NASA, for instance, is an acronym.
Grammarly: Abbreviation Rules

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#2

Big smile, CABAT?

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#3

The Haskell Cabal | Overview does say:

Cabal: Common Architecture for Building Applications and Libraries

Back to the main question, I think we should keep using Cabal and cabal instead of changing it to CABAL simply because changing things always has a cost.

Furthermore, I don’t think we should associate different meanings with different capitalizations of the name (e.g. Cabal vs. cabal) nor require special formatting and punctuation (e.g. .cabal file). If you do want to disambiguate, do so in text. Since the cabal package format is way more popular and older than the project format, I’d think most people would think of the package format when you say “cabal file”. If you want to be completely unambiguous, you can say “cabal package file”.

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#4

How did I miss that?

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#5

Capitalising CABAL to refer to the architecture in the docs might be helpful. We’re not about to change the case of package names or components of packages. This is not a breaking change within the architecture.

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#6

Jaror, I… :stuck_out_tongue:

I am not a fan of CABAL personally, but maybe it will grow on me. Any effort to standardise lexicon is needed, appreciated and welcome!

#7

To the architecture in which sense? The project itself?