[Haskell-cafe] Re: Allowing hyphens in identifiers

[Colin Paul Adams]

>>>>> "Malcolm" == Malcolm Wallace <malcolm.wallace at cs.york.ac.uk> writes:

    >> there is enough experimentally determined about reading in
    >> general to be certain that visible gaps between words
    >> materially improves readability, and internal capital letters
    >> harm it.

    Malcolm> Here is a (slightly mischievous) proposal.

    Malcolm> Allow the Unicode non-breaking space character (&nbsp; in
    Malcolm> HTML) as a valid character in a varid or conid.

    Malcolm> :-)

I thought of that one too (seriously). It has the disadvantage that
the syntax is ambiguous to the human eye without tool support
(e.g. highlighting). On the other hand humans are good at coping with
such ambiguity (we do it all the time in spoken language - and delight
in puns. And in written language, set is indistinguishable from set,
which is indistinguishable from set, which ... - to however many
distinct meanings for the word set are currently recognized).
-- 
Colin Adams
Preston Lancashire