Ruby aesthetics

You said:

I like the LISP convention of
everything lowercase and hyphenated.

Well, I though LISP convention was all UPPER-CASE and hyphenated. Modern LISPs probably ignore case (right?).

These naming conventions are interesting: FORTH, COBOL, LISP all use uppercase and hyphens; Smalltalk used mixed case; others have used the underscore.

David Douthitt
CUNA & Affiliates
UNIX Systems Administrator
ddouthitt@cuna.coop

mgushee@havenrock.com 9/1/02 5:32AM >>>

  • indentation-as-syntax
  • explicit “self” parameter to methods

May I add:

  • lots of useless ‘_’ everywhere…

I beg to differ. The underscores in Python are far from useless:

_foo() is a (pseudo-) protected method*
_bar() is a (pseudo-) private method*
foobar() is a voodoo method (unless it’s init or del)
class
lets you use self-explanatory names without conflict
with reserved words

Now if you called them ugly, I’d be the first to agree with that.
Personally I think the underscore character should be eradicated from
the face of the earth. Call me weird, but I like the LISP convention of
everything lowercase and hyphenated.

  • Python deliberately lacks true access control, the idea being that
    “we’re all adults here.” So ‘protected’ just means the name doesn’t
    get exported, but you can still access it in qualified form;
    ‘private’ means the name gets mangled so that you would have to
    write some really ugly code to get at it.
···

On Sun, Sep 01, 2002 at 06:53:40PM +0900, Luc Heinrich wrote:

On dimanche, sep 1, 2002, at 03:12 Europe/Paris, Gavin Sinclair wrote:


Matt Gushee
Englewood, Colorado, USA
mgushee@havenrock.com

oKAY, OKAY, i’M SORRY!

(not shouting, just playing with case)

I have actually never used Common Lisp: I’ve done a lot of work with
Emacs Lisp, a moderate amount with DSSSL, which is derived from Scheme,
and a bit w/ Scheme itself (Guile, I guess … it was several years
ago). So that’s three LISPish languages I’ve used, and all of them are
normally written in lowercase. Maybe the interpreter sees uppercase; I
didn’t know that, and was in any case more interested in how it looks to
humans, and how it feels to the poor schmuck typing on the keyboard.

···

On Tue, Sep 03, 2002 at 11:24:59PM +0900, David Douthitt wrote:

I like the LISP convention of
everything lowercase and hyphenated.

Well, I though LISP convention was all UPPER-CASE and hyphenated. Modern LISPs probably ignore case (right?).


Matt Gushee
Englewood, Colorado, USA
mgushee@havenrock.com

Matt Gushee mgushee@havenrock.com writes:

···

On Tue, Sep 03, 2002 at 11:24:59PM +0900, David Douthitt wrote:

I like the LISP convention of
everything lowercase and hyphenated.

Well, I though LISP convention was all UPPER-CASE and hyphenated.
Modern LISPs probably ignore case (right?).
Just for the record.
You usually write lower-case in Common Lisp but the reader internally
promotes all to UPPER-CASE. This is the standard behaviour, but can be
changed by changing the readcase.

Regards
Friedrich