Imagine never hearing the phrase ‘INHTPAMA’ again.

Oh, that’s already the case? Bummer.

Often, when talking about Rust, folks refer to the core aliasing rule as “that &mut thing”, “compile-time RWLock ” (or “compile-time RefCell ”), or something similar. Basically, referring to the fact that you can’t mutate the data that is currently held via an & reference, and that you can’t mutate or read the data currently held via an &mut reference except through that reference itself.

It’s always bugged me that we really don’t have a name for this thing. It’s one of the core bits of Rust, and crops up often in discussions.

But we did have a name for it! It was “INHTPAMA” (which was later butchered into “INHTWAMA”).

This is a reference to Niko’s 2012 blog post, titled “Imagine Never Hearing The Phrase ‘aliasable, mutable’ again”. It’s where the aliasing rules came from. Go read it, it’s great. It talks about this weird language with at symbols and purity, but I assure you, that language is Baby Rust. Or maybe Teenage Rust. The lifecycle of rusts is complex and interesting and I don’t know how to categorize it.

The point of this post isn’t really to encourage reviving the use of “INHTWAMA”; it’s a rather weird acronym that will probably confuse folks. I would like to have a better way of refering to “that &mut thing”, but I’d prefer if it wasn’t a confusing acronym that carries no meaning of its own if you don’t know the history of it. That’s a recipe for making new community members feel like outsiders.

But that post is amazing and I’d hate to see it drop out of the collective memory of the Rust community.