Proposal3: Make $_ a valid identifier character

Bert Freudenberg bert at isgnw.CS.Uni-Magdeburg.De
Tue May 30 09:05:41 UTC 2000


[in short: proposal to use char #D0 as word separator]

Hi folks,

I don't really need word separators at all - my native language is German,
which just concatenates words to assemble complex ones:
Sequencablecollection. To enhance readability in extraordinary complex or
ambiguous words, a hyphen is used: Sequencable-Collection.

Now, typographically, there are more than one hyphen-like glyphs (a
horizontal line in about the middle of the row). One is used to
concatenate words. It is as thick as the letters, and relatively short
(about the width of a "t"). Another one is used to separate parts of
sentences (n-dash, as opposed to English's use of an m-dash). The last one
is the minus sign, which is identical to the horizontal bar of the plus
sign. In TeX, the three "dashes" are typed as -, --, and ---,
respectively. A - in math mode is distinuished from the normal one. See
attached image.

So provided that we want explicit word separators, I would suggest using a
hyphen instead of the dash/minus sign, which is typographically correct,
esthetically nice and also resolves the parser problem. Fortunately,
Squeak's MacRoman character set already has that glyph: 
(Character value: 16rD0). 
For input, a minus inserted after a letter would produce a hyphen,
while after any other letter it would become a minus.

-- Bert

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