On Mon, Jul 4, 2011 at 10:43 AM, Eugene Alvin Villar <[email protected]> wrote: > On Mon, Jul 4, 2011 at 9:45 PM, Anthony <[email protected]> wrote: >> On Mon, Jul 4, 2011 at 9:34 AM, Eugene Alvin Villar <[email protected]> wrote: >>> Our tagging system (at least for formal values) generally uses English >>> words, but the syntax is not English grammar. Anyone with an good >>> programming background would immediately recognize how the formal keys >>> and values have been constructed: lowercase letters and with >>> underscores and using colons to provide a "namespace". >> >> I have a programming background, and I thought (and still think) that >> underscore represents a space, not a random character. > > Underscore does usually represent a space in programming languages but > it may also represents other characters that would otherwise not be > allowed in names of variables, functions, etc., like hyphens, slashes, > periods, etc.
I don't deny that the underscore can be used in a programming language to represent a hyphen. I was denying that "Anyone with an good programming background would immediately recognize how the formal keys and values have been constructed". In fact, you don't even elaborate on how the formal keys and values have been constructed other than to assert that hyphens are replaced with underscores (something which would *not* be "immediately recognized", as this is only done in a small number of cases, and even in those small number of cases it isn't always even apparent without doing research that a hyphen was correct in the first place). I'm all for consistency and standards. But that means we should come up with a formal, standardized naming scheme. And if we're going to do that, I see no reason not to include hyphens, nor to replace characters other than spaces with underscores. _______________________________________________ Tagging mailing list [email protected] http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/tagging
