On Mon, Nov 20, 2017 at 11:18 AM, Mikhail V
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? "Hyphen-minus" would make sense for mechanical type-writers. So it is a hyphen, a character used for centuries before typewriters even appeared, and used as such now in 99 percent of medium. 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. Don't forget also to include cases where variables are written without any separator, but should do so.
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?
If you want to. But a simple a-b test (or is that an a_b test?) of hyphens and underscores would be sufficient. For anecdotal evidence, I prefer to write git branch names with hyphens, eg "git checkout rosuav/process-check-run". It's not about the typing (tab completion means I don't have to type either form), it's about the way it looks. So there definitely is _some_ advantage here. I just don't think it's significant, not worth the hassle of changing things around. And this is still ASCII-only. ChrisA