On Sun, Nov 19, 2017 at 3:42 AM, Nick Coghlan <ncogh...@gmail.com> wrote:
> For anyone tempted to suggest "What about multiple underscores > indicating continuation of the variable name?", that's still a > compatibility problem due to the unary minus operator: > > >>> my--variable > 2 > >>> my---variable > 0 That seems to be another showcase of misfotune that Python uses hyphen for minus operator. I know it is not language designer's fault, because basic ASCII simply did not not include minus character. But do you realise that the **current** problem you are adressing is that font designers forgot to make the minus character (in monospaced font) distinctive from the hyphen character? Well, what can I say, I just think it should be a reason to make a collective complain to font providers, but not that you should silently accept this and adopt the language design to someone's sloppy font design. As an aid for monospace die-hards, to minimise the confusion one could publish a style-guide that recommends to disclose the minus operator (currently hyphen char) in spaces, like a - b, and probably disallow the new proposed hyphen character in the beginning of the identifiers. That would still leave potential for confusion because you cant' force everyone to follow style-guides, but one should struggle to break from this cycle anyway. > > Would hyphens in variable names improve readability sometimes? For reading code, indeed, always and very much. Of course not in case I would be forced to use monospaced font with a similar minus and hyphen. But in that case I am already accepting the level of readability of 12th century, so this would not make things much worse, and I would simply put spaces around the minus operator and try to highlight it with some strong color. Mikhail _______________________________________________ Python-ideas mailing list Python-ideas@python.org https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-ideas Code of Conduct: http://python.org/psf/codeofconduct/
