CamelCase versus wide_names (Prothon)

[Doug Tolton]

Terry Reedy wrote:
> "Wilk" <wilkSPAM at OUTflibuste.net> wrote in message
> news:87wu4gjkwb.fsf at blakie.riol...
> 
>>Why not - instead of _ ?
> 
> 
> I believe some Lisps do use -.  If so, they can do so because of the prefix
> and space-separator syntax:
> 
> (- a-c c) is unambiguously a-c - c
> 
> Terry J. Reedy
> 
> 
> 
> 

Terry,

You are right, in fact all Lisps that I've used use a hyphen as the 
convention for variable separators.

(defun my-function (this-is-a-variable another-variable)
	(run-another-function this-is-a-variable another-variable))

Above is a rather verbose example of some lisp code.  Lisp uses 
whitespace as token delimeters which opens up some very interesting 
possibilities for variable names such as *a-global-variable* and many 
others.  The hyphen I find is by far the easiest, most natural and 
visually appealing method for concatenating words IMO (it happens to be 
the method we use in english as well), it also requires the least amount 
of keystrokes.  However the hyphen can only be used in a postfix or a 
prefix notation as it is in Lisp.  With an in-fix syntax like Python I 
don't know how you could un-ambiguously determine the difference between 
"a minus b" and an identifier named a-b.

Given the lisp background, I started out using mixedCase and 
PascalCasing as a convention many years ago.  I found out over the years 
that people have a hard time deciding whether or not some words should 
be all in caps, or only in intial caps (someone used an example above 
something to the effect about theGui or theGUI or TheGUI or even 
TheGui).  A lot of people who love mixed-casing tend to minimize the 
problems with this when using a case-sensitive language, but it gets 
irritating always having to look up the casing on function calls.

Personally I like wide_names better than mixedCase in any language that 
doesn't allow me to use the hyphen for tokens.  My vote is that you 
stick with wide names since you are modeling Prothon on Python.  If you 
were modeling it on Java or C#, then I would agree with mixedCase.  Of 
course this is an aesthetic issue and taste varies wildly on this issue. 
  At my place of employment we have agreed that whoever created the 
module gets to determine the format (ie, mixedCase or wide_case).  As 
you can imagine we have an abundance of stylistic choices.
-- 
Doug Tolton
(format t "~a@~a~a.~a" "dtolton" "ya" "hoo" "com")