Newsgroups: comp.lang.dylan
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From: demars@netcom.com (Dennis C. De Mars)
Subject: Re: dot syntax confusion
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Date: Thu, 15 Feb 1996 01:54:13 GMT
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In article <17634.9602141657@subnode.aiai.ed.ac.uk>, jeff@aiai.ed.ac.uk
(Jeff Dalton) wrote:

>> Well, there's bound to be a difference of opinion on this point, but I
>> think Dylan's got some readability problems. Of course, a programming
>> language doesn't necessarily have to be highly readable to be successful
>> (e.g. C++) but it sure wold be nice if we could learn a few things from
>> past experience.
>
>A good point.  But what can we do now?  The suggestion about
>putting in spaces does help some people.  But does anyone have
>any other ideas?
>
>-- jeff

Well, I just took the opportunity to blow off some steam about this
situation when I saw the subject come up, as it has bugged me for some
time. Agreed that not much can be done now. One thing I can think of
(although I doubt it would ever be adopted): maybe it could be made a rule
in Dylan that the hyphen and underscore characters are considered to be
the same character when used in an identifier, i.e. init-keyword and
init_keyword could be used interchangably. That way, anyone who doesn't
want hyphens in identifiers could even write all of the predefined
functions & keywords without hyphens.

There are probably some issues I haven't though of though (what do you do
about hyphens in symbols for instance) and anyway I guess it would be
regarded a pretty weird idea.

- Dennis D.
