Chris A wrote: > Both of these create extremely confusing situations, where two > nearly-identical symbols have completely different meanings.
In reality, hyphen and Minus sign are not even closely similar - Minus is ca. twice as wide, however the citizens of the Monospaced Kingdom may disagree ; ) Though I think its population will dramatically decrease in one or two decades. > Solution 2 is a massive backward-compatibility break. Yep, although elimination of improper usage is always good thing in longer perspective (and less new additional chars). But I do realise that it is a non-starter. > ... a marginal benefit ... How much benefit do you REALLY get > from using hyphens rather than underscores? IMO it's far higher than marginal, at least compared to most syntax proposals I remember. One of the hardest and most important tasks which a programmer is faced, is making readable variable names. Underscores are still one of the MOST ugly things I observe currently in Python syntax. This means, if fixings this, then there will be only "small warts" left (such as e.g. single quotes). For me, one "cheap" solution against underscores is to use syntax highlighting which grays them out, but if those become like spaces, then it becomes a bit confusing, e.g. in function with many arguments. Also, unfortunately, not many editors allow easy (if any) highlighting customisation on that level. One possible solution is to use a custom font that has hyphen instead of the underscore, but this is not a proper solution, because, well, the character standard is still there, regardless I like it or not. And one should still have an alternative, i.e. *not only one* separator, for example to denote something "special". Also it can enrich some semantical emphasis, e.g.: my-variable_global Mikhail _______________________________________________ Python-ideas mailing list Python-ideas@python.org https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-ideas Code of Conduct: http://python.org/psf/codeofconduct/
