BERT

[Richard O'Keefe]

BERT is a nice idea, but there's one thing I learned to be very scared
of when working on Prolog implementations:  reserved atoms.  (Anyone
who knows what numbervars/3 does will know the trouble caused by  
'$VAR'.)

Instead of the bert-rpc.org specification saying that library writers
should just make sure that 'bert' never turns up as the first element
of a tuple, it should say that {bert,bert} decodes as 'bert', and ask
library writers to always represent 'bert' as {bert,bert}.

I mention it here because I've found the rule "make life simpler for
users of an encoding even if it makes life harder for the encoder"
a good one.