[isabelle-dev] Towards the next release --- and release naming scheme

[Florian Haftmann]

Hi all,

> Any name needs to be reasonably compact: in papers, authors regularly
> refer to the precise version of Isabelle used.

that observation is important.

In my view the current schema has the following weaknesses:
* No separator between »Isabelle« and year (an imitation of CaMlCaSe).
* Two numeric identifiers side by side.

None of these is pressing enough to change the current schema, but if we
change the schema, they should be addressed.

Personally I'd go with sth. like

	Isabelle-2021-Dec

Since the name is supposed to appear in print, a dash seems more
suitable than an underscore.  This is in accordance with programming
environments appearing in big major version series often referred to as
jdk-8, jdk-11, jdk-17 etc.

Although Isabelle-2021-Dec is more verbose than e. g. Isabelle-2021a, I
guess the exact release name is typically quoted at most twice in a
typical paper.

I have some sympathy for Isabelle-2021a but it has the disadvantage that
it is not symmetric: both Isabelle-2021 and Isabelle-2021a refer to
proper »full« releases and Isabelle-2021a is not a »minor« or »patch«
release of Isabelle-2021.

Cheers,
	Florian

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