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[Guy Steele <cbmvax!uunet!Think.COM!gls>]

   From: cbmvax!snark.thyrsus.com!eric@uunet.UU.NET (Eric S. Raymond)
   Date: Fri, 14 Jun 91 18:44:16 EDT
   ...
   >                                               Now talk of the
   > future is necessarily approximate and speculative, so it's okay
   > to use "is", which has the same properties, in that kind of framework
   > for most purposes.

   In fact, I don't think your conclusion follows from your premise.  If talk
   of the future is necessary speculative, semantic hygiene is *more* important,
   not less --- it is *more* important that `predictive' equality be marked as
   a semi-predicate, a slippery thing.

It is important that it be understood, but if it is universally
understood it need not be marked.  A loose reading of Zipf's law
is that only the unusual should be explicitly marked; the more
unusual, the bigger a mark is merited.  That which is universally
true should be universally suppressed.  (Application in programming
languages: C has a unary "*" operator for pointer dereferencing.
This is appropriate, because the use of a pointer is less usual in C
than not using a pointer.  But it is only somewhat less usual, so
it merits a small marker.  Compare this to Lisp; pointer dereferencing
is /never/ marked, not because there are no pointers, but because
/everything/ is a pointer.)
--Guy