Please kill this thread. On Sun, Nov 19, 2017 at 7:57 PM, Bruce Leban <br...@leban.us> wrote:
> > On Sun, Nov 19, 2017 at 4:18 PM, Mikhail V <mikhail...@gmail.com> wrote: > >> Bruce Leban wrote: >> >> > It is not a misfortune or even true that Python uses hyphen for minus. >> > The name of the character used in Python is HYPHEN-MINUS. >> >> This is pure demagogy, name it HYPHEN-MINUS-TINYDASH if you like, >> but what aspect of reality does it change apart of its name? >> > > You've gone from making a bad suggestion to trolling. > > While you may *think* this character is a hyphen, you're simply wrong. > When ASCII was created it was a 7-bit character set limited to 94 printable > characters plus space and 33 control characters. The designers explicitly > added a single double-duty character for both hyphen and minus, just as > they added a single character for single and double quotes rather than left > and right quotes. Were they mimicking the typewriter? Maybe they were > following the example of Hollerith code which only had uppercase. It > doesn't matter. It's not that they were unaware of the different uses or > the existence of typographic quotes. Just as monospace fonts were not > created because people didn't know about variable width fonts. It is what > it is. And pretending other people are idiots is inappropriate. > > You can use accent grave as a left quote and apostrophe as a right quote > if you want to, but if you insist that Python is living in the dark ages > because it doesn't do things *your way* then you're just being rude. > > ... render >> hyphen as *hyphen*, which is well established for centuries in typography, >> and defined as a dash of 50% width of the letter "o" and is aligned to >> lowercase. >> As well as the Minus glyph which is defined as ca. 110% of "o" width >> and is aligned > > > False. There is no standard going back centuries defining the widths of > the different kinds of dashes. For that matter, there is no standard > *today* for what letters and symbols look like. See Doug Hofstadter's great > paper on this https://web.stanford.edu/group/SHR/4-2/text/hofstadter.html > or the Unicode consortium list of emoji https://unicode.org/emoji/ > charts/full-emoji-list.html for great examples of the non-standard nature > of typography. Heck almost all vendors put cheese on the *hamburger* emoji > when obviously it only belongs on the cheeseburger emoji. And Google puts > the cheese below the meat which is clearly wrong as the international > standard for cheeseburgers puts the cheese on the top. > > Just take some Python sources and count the amount of underscores >> and minus operators. This will give you an image of how important >> separators are compared to minus operator. >> > > A non sequitur. Count the number of instances of the letter Z in English > vs. the letter E which tells you that Z is unimportant. So let's get rid of > it. Of course that may piss off the Polish people since it's the 9th most > frequent letter (4.9%) in Polish. While this makes a great story -- see > "Meihem In Ce Klasrum" http://www.tau.ac.il/~pauzner/funs/simpler.html -- > but not a great reality. > > That said, no one has argued that a word separator in names is a bad idea > and we have two choices: capitalizingEachWord and > underscores_between_words. These work well enough that the idea of breaking > every single Python program that uses subtraction just because one person > believes we are being antediluvian -- without any evidence -- is just not > going to happen. (Ooh. See what I did there. I typed two hyphen-minus > characters to get an "em dash" and you probably didn't even notice that I > was breaking centuries of tradition that the only proper way to write an em > dash is with a single piece of metal type.) > > If you want to make serious contributions to Python or any other project > you need to understand why this is a bad idea. > > >> >> > I am extremely skeptical that a legitimate usability study would >> > find that record-count is better than record_count. >> >> Oh come on, probably you also want study for emoticons as a separators? >> > > Yes, if someone insisted that emoticons were superior to underscores as > separators and implied I was an idiot for not agreeing with that. > > --- Bruce > > > _______________________________________________ > Python-ideas mailing list > Python-ideas@python.org > https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-ideas > Code of Conduct: http://python.org/psf/codeofconduct/ > > -- --Guido van Rossum (python.org/~guido)
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