Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!uunet!mcsun!sunic!tut!tukki!sakkinen
From: sakkinen@tukki.jyu.fi (Markku Sakkinen)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.eiffel
Subject: Re: Eiffel naming discussion
Message-ID: <2221@tukki.jyu.fi>
Date: 30 Nov 89 08:52:45 GMT
References: <471d0bb3.12c9a@digital.sps.mot.com> <40650001@hpindda.HP.COM>
Reply-To: sakkinen@jytko.jyu.fi (Markku Sakkinen)
          SAKKINEN@FINJYU.bitnet (alternative)
Organization: University of Jyvaskyla, Finland
Lines: 40

In article <40650001@hpindda.HP.COM> brucem@hpindda.HP.COM (Bruce Mackey) writes:
-shelley@btc.sps.mot.com (Norman K. Shelley) wrote:
-> I prefer internal upper-case letters to signify where new words begin
-> as it is easier for my eye to determine that those are new words whereas
-> underscores look like word runons.  I really dislike underscores as word
-> separators and no separators at all i.e. all lower case are even worse.
-> As for Hyphens, I could probably train my eye but I'd still prefer
-> internal upper-case.
-
- [...]
-IMHO, the underscore combines the two requirements nicely:
-   1. continuous non-blank characters for ease of compiler recognition
-   2. spacing for ease of human recognition.

Shelley had also written:
->Page 240 of "Eiffel: The Language" states that "internal upper-case
->letters ... as in putAtRight, contradicts the standard conventions of
->English ... and is not part of the recommended style."
->
->I agree BUT must note that the underscore ('_') as a word separator is
->NOT English either.  A whitespace is the accepted standard but computers
->have troubles with whitespace in names/labels so what do we do?  Common Lisp
->uses hypens ('-') as a separator and this has more acceptance in English
->than an underscore.  So if we can't use blanks because of computer
->limitation and
->internal upper-case because it does not match current language conventions,
->then I think hyphens make MUCH more sense than underscores which themself
->do NOT conform to current language conventions.

I think Mackey's requirements don't really rule out hyphens either.
But the problem with hyphens in programming languages is that they look
so similar to minus signs. In fact, all standard character codes
(as far as I know) have made the mistake to totally confound the two.

Markku Sakkinen
Department of Computer Science
University of Jyvaskyla (a's with umlauts)
Seminaarinkatu 15
SF-40100 Jyvaskyla (umlauts again)
Finland