On Sat, 2010-04-10 at 17:20 -0700, yary wrote: > Adjectives and nouns aren't English-only. So Damian's proposal is > multi-culti. One could argue that Perl's identifiers, keywords, etc > are based on English so that it is more difficult for a non-English > speaker to discern why underscore is used in some places and hyphens > in other. The solution to that would be rote memorization of method > names, including "_" and "-" in the spelling. Not ideal, but most > likely what many English speaking programmers would do too. And would > cuss over.
And there's the rub for me. One of the goals of Perl 6 is to reduce the amount of rote memorization of special cases that Perl 5 required. Any mixed use of _ and - in the standard setting defies that goal. (FWIW, I don't really care which is used -- I see arguments for both -- but I do firmly believe the standard setting should only use one or the other. Damian's Temporal example in which only one method used a different separator made the rules-versus-exceptions part of my brain scream for mercy.) -'f
