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From: lgm@polaris.ih.att.com (Lawrence G. Mayka)
Subject: Re: Flexible variable names
In-Reply-To: mhamburg@mv.us.adobe.com's message of Mon, 14 Nov 1994 06:53:56 GMT
Message-ID: <LGM.94Nov14172818@polaris.ih.att.com>
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References: <will-0911941658570001@willsmac.cs.su.oz.au>
	<LGM.94Nov13204304@polaris.ih.att.com>
	<mhamburg-131194225356@macb022.mv.us.adobe.com>
Date: Mon, 14 Nov 1994 23:28:18 GMT
Lines: 47

In article <mhamburg-131194225356@macb022.mv.us.adobe.com> mhamburg@mv.us.adobe.com (Mark Hamburg) writes:

   In article <LGM.94Nov13204304@polaris.ih.att.com>, lgm@polaris.ih.att.com
   (Lawrence G. Mayka) wrote:

   > In article <will-0911941658570001@willsmac.cs.su.oz.au> will@cs.su.oz.au (William Uther) writes:

   >      I'm only just starting to write Dylan code.  Do people find the fact
   >    that spaces are so significant annoying?  It can lead to strange code such
   >    as:
   > 
   >    ? begin
   >    >  let a = 10;
   >    >  let b = 20;
   >    >  let a+b = 2;
   >    >  a+b + a + b;
   >    > end;
   >    32
   > 
   >    Which is not entirely obvious, especially for someone used to C or Pascal.
   > 
   >      Is this just a MacMarlais thing?  Do people find it a problem - is the
   >    ability to have +, - etc in variable names worth the potential for bugs?
   > 
   > When I worked in a large C development project, it was considered bad
   > style not to surround all operators (except function call and array
   > reference) by whitespaace.  Whitespace increases readability.  Also,
   > it was considered bad style to rely on C's byzantine operator
   > precedence except in the most obvious, simple cases.  Why cause
   > difficult-to-spot bugs simply to save a couple of keystrokes?
   > 
   > I have often thought that the effort wasted in devising, then writing
   > parsers for, baroque syntaxes that are bad style anyway could have
   > been better spent elsewhere.

   So are you for it or against it?

I'm in favor of permitting variable names to be as expressive as
possible, including use of the hyphen.  Its consequent, the need to
surround operators with whitespace, I consider desirable for good
style anyway, and hence not a significant hardship for programmers.
--
        Lawrence G. Mayka
        AT&T Bell Laboratories
        lgm@ieain.att.com

Standard disclaimer.
