I don't want to ban any Julia user from using underscores in a name. But I 
think it would be nice to have consistency in the naming convention of the 
standard library. I've seen that a lot of names come from Matlab and Matlab 
happen to be (this is my advice) the worst thing that happen to the 
scientific community in terms of langage and naming conventions.

But you may be right. Having the consistency of a tool such as Mathematica 
might be something that's hard to reproduce in an open source project. It's 
sad, because it is something that I do value a lot. For instance, I do work 
on C++ projects where I am alone and I am using C++ coding guidelines.

That's why it should be nice to have a good "coding guideline" that is 
enforced across the Julia standard library, especially for naming 
convention.

On Sunday, April 26, 2015 at 5:27:44 PM UTC+2, Tamas Papp wrote:
>
> I am not sure that "banning" naming conventions is feasible in an open 
> source context. Also, as Scott Jones pointed out, the documentation 
> itself is not consistent. 
>
> I prefer underscores, and I guess I will continue using them wherever 
> they make sense. Perhaps people could file an issues about very 
> abbreviated names, but IMO cholfact is OK. Naming functions is more of 
> an art than a science; style guides are useful but do not necessarily 
> lead to unambigous rules. 
>
> Best, 
>
> Tamas 
>
> On Sun, Apr 26 2015, François Fayard <[email protected] <javascript:>> 
> wrote: 
>
> > I tend to prefer names with underscores, but the Julia team has decided 
> to 
> > use names without underscores. I don't want to change that but, I think 
> > many things need to be fixed: 
> > - shortnames should be banned: cholfact for instance might be replaced 
> by 
> > choleskyfactorization. Using shortnames without word separation is just 
> a 
> > nightmare. And it's not because Matlab is a mess regarding this matter 
> that 
> > Julia should imitate it. 
> > - underscores should be banned: we need consistency, and there are 
> places 
> > with underscores, some without. We could keep underscores for functions 
> > that do 2 things. 
> > 
> > Consistency is of uttermost importance in a langage with a lot of 
> functions 
> > in the standard library. 
>

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