On Mon, Aug 18, 2014 at 11:56 AM, TR NS <[email protected]> wrote: > > On Monday, August 18, 2014 8:45:58 AM UTC-4, Stefan Karpinski wrote: >> >> It is a convention, but it isn't required anywhere or guaranteed. You can >> currently count on package names being ASCII. >> > > Do you expect the ASCII part will eventually change too? If I can count on > ASCII, that means I can pretty much count on the fact that foreign > languages such as Chinese and Arabic, that do not have capitalization, will > never be used for package names. And if that's always going to be the case, > then it seems like the capitalization thing may as well just be a rule and > not a convention. Of course, even if such languages are eventually > supported, it could still be a rule with an exception for such languages. > > I guess what I am saying, from the other way round, is if it's not going > to be a rule, why even bother with the convention? >
The ASCII part seems like a good thing to stick to. Unicode support for file names is not universal yet and is very likely to cause problems. ASCII is pretty much the only thing you can count on working right in all file systems. Conventions are for people, not computers. None of the operating system, the language or the package manager have any reason to care if a package name is uppercase or not. It's nice for people if these things are somewhat consistent, however. Since module names in Julia are uppercase by convention, package names are too. But there's no good reason for the language or the package manager to fail if a module or package isn't uppercase. Why make things more rigid than they have to be? What's the reason you want to rely on packages being capitalized?
