Case sensitivity

[Greg Ewing (using news.cis.dfn.de)]

Terry Reedy wrote:
> Is it still possible to add '-' as a name (and re-word) character?

COBOL gets away with this by requiring whitespace either
side of '-' when it's used as the subtraction operator
(I think -- COBOL is not the language I'm most familiar
with:-).

Python *could* have been designed to require the same
thing, but doing it now would be a Massively Backward
Incompatible Change.

BTW, you can blame the mathematicians for this -- they
overloaded '-' long before programming languages came
into existence. Although it didn't cause them a problem
because they never used identifiers more than one
character long...

-- 
Greg Ewing, Computer Science Dept,
University of Canterbury,	
Christchurch, New Zealand
http://www.cosc.canterbury.ac.nz/~greg