On Jun 9, 1:42 pm, Gary Herron <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Rainy wrote: > > I have a stylistic question. In most languages words in var. name are > > separated by underscores or cap letters, resulting in var names like > > var_name, VarName and varName. I don't like that very much because all > > 3 ways of naming look bad and/or hard to type. From what I understand, > > scheme can have variables like var-name. I'm curious about reasons > > that python chose to disallow this. > > Because we'd prefer var-name to mean subtraction of values: var minus > name. If you want to use a that character in names, what syntax would > you prefer for subtraction? Do you consider lisp/scheme (- a b) to be > reasonable in Python?
I would make it that var - var2 would be subtraction and var-name would be a var name. I don't like (- a b) but I might have preferred it if it allowed dashes inside var names, if I got used to it. Hard to say. > > > Another question I have is what > > other languages allow this naming scheme? Were there any languages > > that allowed space as a separator? > > Fortran used to. (Haven't checked in on it in years though so I don't > know now). And it not so much as allowed spaces as it *ignored* all > spaces. This was now-a-days considered a *really* bad idea, and is > rumored to be responsible for a bug that crashed a satellite. (At least > that's the way a nice urban legend tells it.) Well, if I understand right, fortran used caps for many things? I'm not sure how it separated things if it ignored all spaces. I'll trust you that it's not a good idea :-). However that's not what I meant, I'd just like to use (or rather try using) spaces inside var names. -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
