Smylers wrote:
Could we have underscores and hyphens mean the same thing? That is, Perl 6 always interprets illo-figut and illo_figut as being the same identifier (both for its own identifiers and those minted in programs), with programmers able to use either separator on a whim?
I oppose this. Underscores and hyphens should remain distinct.
That would seem to be the most human-friendly approach.
I disagree. More human friendly is "if it looks different in any way then it is different". (I am not also saying that same-looking things are equal, given Unicode's redundancy.)
If you're going to treat hyphens and underscores in identifiers as being equal then you should make them case-insensitive too, because its the same kind of lack of distinction.
I think that a better change, if we're going to change something, is to make hyphens illegal in bareword identifiers, just allowing them in quoted ones.
Then we also gain consistency that if something looks symbolic then its an operator, not a question of whether we have a minus operator or not.
If one points to XML as an example of working hyphens in bareword identifiers, I should point out that those are typically in a "<>"-quoted context, and we also don't see symbolic bareword operators in the same place. Apples and oranges.
-- Darren Duncan
