[Python-ideas] Allow additional separator character in variables

[Chris Angelico]

On Mon, Nov 20, 2017 at 11:18 AM, Mikhail V <mikhailwas at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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