To Underscore or Not to Underscore
Richard O'Keefe and I were privately discussing the relative merits of his
and my approach. We have come to an agreement. It concerns whether or not
hyphens should be replaced with underscores. The following is my response to
his most recent letter:
I do not believe your approach given what you wrote here will create the
sort of ambiguity I feared could be introduced. If an ambiguity results, it
could be fixed. As I would put it, you hope to harmonize the word breaking
styles by a process similar to though slightly more involved than what is
done to remove case sensitivity in some languages. As layout is concerned
only leading white space needs to be preserved. Anything else could be
regarded as a superstition (not to say that computer scientists are
superstitious).
What you hope to do is kill two birds with one stone. If the only goal is to
run everything through a preprocessor my approach seems to make the greatest
sense, but if you also hope to harmonize the representation of word breaking
styles, then what you are advocating seems to make greater sense. Your
approach seems more consistent with Haskell traditions than mine. Therefore,
I concede. You have successfully argued your point.
_______________________________________________
Haskell-Cafe mailing list
Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org
http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe
