Comment #302

Comments are apparently available on on the tech side, not the linguistics side, though this comment really belongs there rather than here. The DEC PDP-10, which was used at MIT in the Elder Days, was a 36-bit machine, so it was natural to represent short strings in a single word, 6 characters to a word and 6 bits to a character (lower case and control characters were excluded). So what was PLANNER in papers was MPLR (Micro-Planner, because it wasn't a full implementation) on the system, and likewise for CONNIVER, which was I think CONiVR (not sure). Nobody remembers why the implementation of the third language was called SCHEME rather than SCHEMR, but it was, and then it was natural to call the language SCHEME, later Scheme.