[Cryptography Team] re: removing underscores

[Craig Latta]

Hi Ron--

> Given the potential problems for others to load the code absent a
> major argument within the community to allow them, I think we should
> remove them.

     I think that's the best argument, sadly.

     I'll just throw out, though, that if we move to a system that can
transfer behavior without requiring source code at all (e.g., Spoon[1]),
then this issue is utterly moot.


-C

p.s.

> I really don't understand.. the argument that they are aesthetically
> displeasing.  They seem reasonable to me.

     As I understand it, the underscore character is considered
aesthetically displeasing because it's a typewriter hack, intended for
underlining things (typing other characters, moving the carriage
backward, and overtyping some underscores). It's considered ugly because
it's an anachronism, and the subsequent hack of separating tokens in a
human's mind within what a machine considers a single token is not
sufficient to redeem it (and that the hack of using it for assignment is
more worthwhile, mostly because it is displayed as something else).

     For the sake of good taste and tact I will refrain from divulging
my own personal opinion about it. ;)

[1] http://netjam.org/spoon

-- 
Craig Latta
http://netjam.org/resume