[Haskell-cafe] Re: Re: Allowing hyphens in identifiers

[Richard O'Keefe]

On Dec 10, 2009, at 12:24 PM, Maciej Piechotka wrote:
[it appears that I have been misinformed about "." vs " . "]
>
> Personally I don't have any strong feelings about conventions as  
> long as
> they are consistent within one language. Camel cases are no more
> uncommon then the underscore and they saved space in the past (ok. now
> it does not matter) and hyphen is very rarly used (to not have problem
> with minus).

baStudlyCase was *never* about saving space.
It was copied from Smalltalk by people who failed to realise that
Smalltalk did it that way because the Smalltalk character set didn't
_have_ an underscore.

Nor is being "uncommon" the issue.
>
>
> For example:
> - Java - camel cases both in classes and methods (convention very
> similar to Haskell)

which is why I have something similar to my little hspp tool for
reading and writing Java.

The fact that other people do something ill-considered is no reason
why we have to follow them.  Your own list of languages shows that
baStudlyCase is not universal.

For that matter, the Interlisp and S convention was to separate
words in an identifier with dots.

(once again, every runTogetherWord inThisMessage is flagged as a
spelling mistake...)

Thanks to GHC's -F and -pgmF options, people can now choose
whether to writeInAnUnreadableAndUglyStyle or not.  Brilliant!