Yeah, and interestingly, a lot of unsafe functions use "unchecked" in their names.
The issue was that by the time this was recognized, there was too much Rust code, and there was no clear alternative that people universally liked. This kind of conversation is the definition of bikeshedding. I submitted an RFC and it... didn't go well. (I think I picked "trustme" though.)
I don't think it's bikeshedding. It does seem to be contributing to the dogmatism I'm seeing from the Rust community here, and this community reaction is a huge problem for Rust. So it matters.
Bike shedding is a structural description, not a value judgement. It’s about technical complexity, and changing a keyword is one of the most minimally complex bits of language design.
My point isn't to argue over the definition of bike shedding. If the name of this keyword is contributing to this undesirable community outburst, then its name matters, and discussions about its name are important. That's all I'm saying. If that's what you originally meant, then we are on the same page :).
Back then Rust did not have editions. I think it would be worth exploring renaming `unsafe` blocks to "sound", because when one writes `sound { ... }` what one is actually stating is that the code in the block has been proven sound.
The `unsafe` function type modifier can be left as unsafe, or renamed to unsound, since that what that is doing is stating that a particular function is not always sound to call.
That doesn't mean that people will incorrectly interpret it, though.