I like hyphens. They're easier to type and help
prevent_me_from_Doing_This and generating errors because of case
sensitivity.
On the other hand, consistency of appearance may be a problem for some
people. I often associate code with the way it looks on screen, not
necessarily with what it does or says. Looking for
some_code_like_this() in a place that uses some-code-like-this() might
be troublesome.
- sebastian
On 11/16/05, Daniel Brockman <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> I'm not a Lisp weenie. However, I have always preferred
> hyphens over underscores, and I have always preferred
> identifiers that use delimiters over camel-cased ones.
>
> I just think `foo-bar-baz' looks better than `foo_bar_baz'.
> Maybe it's the "lexical connotation" of hyphens from natural
> language (it joins words), or maybe it's that hyphens fall
> more or less on the center of gravity of an identifier,
> whereas underscores usually fall beneath the baseline,
> making it a purely typographical preference.
>
> Maybe it's that I like Lisp, Dylan, CSS, XSLT, or some other
> language in which hyphens are predominant. But I don't
> think that's it, because I like even more languages in which
> underscores are predominant. It's simply that I like the
> look of the identifiers better in Lisp.
>
> I realize that lots of people feel the same, only with the
> exact opposite viewpoint. It's purely a matter of taste.
>
> My brother just walked past my monitor, glanced through the
> above text and exclaimed, "Yeah, if Perl 6 allowed hyphens
> in identifiers, it would be, like, the ultimate language!"
>
> I don't mean to quote my beloved brother as an authority on
> this matter (quite to the contrary, I don't think there are
> any authorities, since it's a matter of taste). I just mean
> to illustrate that people do feel strongly about this issue.
> (And I don't need to tell you that aesthetic aspects play a
> serious role in deciding, if not whether a person is going
> to end up liking the language, then at least what their
> first impression is going to be.)
>
> So what is my suggestion? Obviously disallowing underscores
> and instead allowing hyphens would just replace one problem
> with an even worse problem (not only would there still be
> people who don't like hyphens, but it would alienate a large
> portion of the user base). Therefore, to make the language
> more appealing (i.e., less alienating) to the group of
> people I am going to refer to as "Lispers", it's obvious
> that both characters should be allowed.
>
> But simply adding hyphen as another character allowed in
> identifiers would only superficially solve the problem.
> To be sure, it would cause a new group of people, Lispers,
> to migrate to Perl 6, and might even case a few long-time
> users (any closet Lispers around?) to switch to hyphens.
> But it would also doom these two camps to forever remain at
> war with one another.
>
> This is because if you like underscores, you aren't going to
> want libraries to use to have hyphens all over the place.
> For one thing, it would be plain hell to have to remember
> which packages used underscores and which used hyphens.
>
> Therefore, my suggestion is to allow both characters, but
> have them mean the same thing. This concept caused some
> confusion on IRC, so let me provide a screenshot:
>
> sub foo-bar ($x) { say $x }
> foo_bar(42); # says 42
>
> (image courtesy of luqui on #perl6)
>
> If you think about it, this makes sense. Just as you are
> not forced to use the same indentation style as the authors
> of the libraries you use, you should be free to use whichever
> word-joiner (subtle hint not intended) you prefer.
>
> I did not invent this solution. "For convenience," as the
> modprobe(1) man page puts it, "there is no difference
> between _ and - in module names." As another example,
> GObject, the GTK+ object system, uses it to allow
>
> g_object_set (foo, "bar-baz") and
>
> g_object_set (foo, "bar_baz")
>
> as synonymous, which is particularly convenient since there
> are so many different language bindings for GObject.
> (I should --- since it is advantageous to my case --- point
> out that GObject uses hyphens internally.) There are probably
> other examples (if you can think of any, please tell).
>
> Anyway, if we can agree --- without considering the syntactical
> implications --- that it is desirable to make these characters
> synonymous, we have to look at the implications next.
>
> The first thing that comes to mind is that some people write
> binary minus without surrounding whitespace. Were this
> proposal to be accepted, those people would do best to
> change habits, lest they be bitten when they try to subtract
> the return value of a subroutine call from something.
>
> What about unary minus? I propose the following:
>
> -foo-bar === -(foo-bar) === -(foo_bar)
> _foo-bar === _foo-bar === _foo_bar
>
> That is, hyphen and underscore are synonymous in identifiers,
> but an initial hyphen is not taken to be part of the identifier.
>
> I'm not sure about postfix unary minus, however. You could
> argue the case both ways (so please do that).
>
> My gut feeling is that any postfix unary minus is doomed to
> be confusing either way, so it might not matter.
>
> Oh, by the way, I've been using hyphens in my Ruby
> identifiers for some time now, and have not ran into any
> serious problems. The problems I have ran into are related
> to either the modified Ruby mode for Emacs, or to the kludgy
> implementation --- I wrote a preprocessor that parses code
> looking for identifiers. You can find that here:
>
> <http://www.brockman.se/software/hyphen-ruby/>
>
>
> Finally, I realize that this is a religious issue, I hope
> that I have not stepped on anybody's toes, and I humbly ask
> that you approach this discussion with an open mind.
>
>
> Kind regards,
>
> --
> Daniel Brockman <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
>
>
