Hi
a thought regarding the dependence of readability and restrictions.
The argument that lifting the restrictions and leave the
responsibility about readability to the programmer would ruin it,
disregards that even the restrictions in place now do NOT prevent a
programmer from using hard to read or hard to distinguish names.
Think of two variables named:
j32ilh2k3q74 and j32lih2k3q74
So, the reason, why you hardly see such names (except in Fortran
numerical code (:-) is that most (in particular Pascal-) programmers
are aware of the connection between naming and readability. The
extent is clearly different between different people and whether the
pro developers (being paid for coding) do better than hobby
programmers is another topic.
I found it just very convenient to reflect filenames in variables and
the naming restrictions on filenames are more relaxed than on Pascal
identifiers, even in unix.
Furthermore, I suggest to demangle the topic. Their are easy to
separate topics, that can be discussed separately.
- lowercase/uppercase sensitivity
- allowing other characters than '_', all printable and within 7bit
ASCII, such as '-', '%',..
- although space would be included in the above, it is somewhat
special regarding readability.
- relaxing the restriction on the first character.
- mandatory quotation or not
- allowing 8bit ascii or unicode
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