Hi, Greg Wilson:
Tim Peters: http://www.python.org/doc/essays/styleguide.html
On Tue, 6 Jun 2000, Christopher Petrilli wrote: The only thing that might be added (I haven't looked in a while, but didn't see it last time I did), is some naming convention issues. I follow pretty standard Smalltalk guidelines:
- No '_', use camelCase for seps
I know this is become common practice, but I've been told by two different HCI specialists that studies have shown CamelBackNotation to be harder for non-native speakers to read than underbar_separated_text, particularly when acronyms are part of the name. If anyone has a pointer to an original reference for this, I'd be grateful.
This would be indeed very interesting. But my own experiences support this POV: This naming style issue is similar in Python and one of its early anchestors Modula-2. In 1985 we started our company programming in Modula-2. At that time we decided to code conforming to the original Modula-2 language definition as published by N.Wirth in March, 1980: underscores were not allowed in identifiers! German: '_' verboten! ;-) The software is in use until today and several of our employees still have to use Modula-2 for maintainance. The code base is currently about 1 Mio. LOC. We tried to use english identifiers, although all programmers are native german speakers. We too adopted a style using first char lowercase or uppercase to distinguish identifier classes (modules and procedure names uppercase and all other identifiers lowercase) and later we ran into the problems described above. A few years ago we allowed the use of '_' in identifiers, because the compiler support was available. This has improved the situation somewhat. All our programmers like the possibility to occasionally use '_' in identifiers, especially if idents contain acronyms. Regards, Peter -- Peter Funk, Oldenburger Str.86, D-27777 Ganderkesee, Germany, Fax:+49 4222950260 office: +49 421 20419-0 (ArtCom GmbH, Grazer Str.8, D-28359 Bremen)