Subject: Re: Ancient Times (Was: Re: introduction to Lisp...) From: Erik Naggum <erik@naggum.net> Date: Mon, 15 Apr 2002 12:40:32 GMT Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp Message-ID: <3227863232118899@naggum.net> * Rahul Jain | Did people actually use underscores as word separators back then? I | thought the underscore was a very rare character to have before ASCII was | in nearly universal use. The underscore is quite young. The character in that position in ASCII and its precursors has a long history, but generally, _ was a back-arrow and ^ was an up-arrow. _ has come to replace blank, which many have rendered as an underscore with very short vertical bars on each side. Primitive syntax descriptions have a serious problem with whitespace, so they claim that a-b is three tokens, a_b one. This arbitrariness is frustrating to people who know better. OfCoursePeopleWhoWriteLikeThisDoNotSeeTheProblem. | Or is this just an attempt to make the C programmers taking the class | feel better? It is probably a feebleminded attempt to learn real syntaxes in stages, slow adaptability or something. I mean, no textbooks on Lisp or Scheme or any other sufficiently similar language uses _ in identifiers, so this is an independent creation of the student who is unable to observe what others are doing. Generally, I consider poor indentation and _ in symbol names a clear sign that the requestor is more lost that I would consider it in my interest to try to rectify. But more generally, space should be a valid character in identifiers, and with ISO 8859 and Unicode, it can be: just use the non-breaking-space. I think this really _rules_ for extra super-high readability. /// -- In a fight against something, the fight has value, victory has none. In a fight for something, the fight is a loss, victory merely relief. Post with compassion: http://home.chello.no/~xyzzy/kitten.jpg