Mailman 3 Allow additional separator character in variables - Python-ideas

19 Nov 2017

      Python allows underscore character as a separator in variables.
This is better than nothing, still it does not make the look much better.

**Proposal**: allow additional separator, namely hyphen character.

**Benefits**: this should provide significant readability improvement.
Compared to most syntax change proposals that I remember till now,
this seems to have really tangible benefits. So all in all I see it as
a significant
language improvement.
Besides its direct benefit as a good looking separator, it also gives
an opprtunity
to reduce "camelCase" or similar ugly inclusions in code.

So one can easily compose human-readable variable names e.g.:
my-variable
figure-shape---width
etc.

**Problem**: currently hyphen character is used as a minus operator!
The problem is as old as the history of most programming languages,
and inherited from initial poorness of character sets.
Therefore I don't see a single optimal solution to this.

Possible solutions:

Solution 1:
Use another similar looking character from unicode,
for example: U+02D7  (modifier letter minus sign).
At the same time IMO it is needed to allow the minus character
for the minus operator, namely U+2212 Minus sign. This will
allow proper typography of source code.
Main benefit of such approach: no breakage of current code base,
since new chars are additional to existing ones.

Solution 2: (radical)
Disallow hyphen as minus operator, and use only U+2212 Minus sign.
I.e. "a-b" would be a variable and "a − b" a minus operation.
Advantage: opportunity to correct the improper character usage once and for all.
Disadvantage: breakage of current code base + force UTF-8 storage use (consider
e.g. editors without unicode support).
Thus most probably such solution will cause howl reaching to the sky among
users, despite many modern editors allow unicode and custom operator styling,
for example to distinguish dash from hyphen in a monospaced editor.

So is my proposal, and as usual urging for constructive conversation.
(i.e. proposing to write own language/translator is not constructive
conversation)

Cheers,
Mikhail

Allow additional separator character in variables

Mikhail V

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