On Dec 10, 2009, at 12:24 PM, Maciej Piechotka wrote: [it appears that I have been misinformed about "." vs " . "]
Personally I don't have any strong feelings about conventions as long as they are consistent within one language. Camel cases are no more uncommon then the underscore and they saved space in the past (ok. now it does not matter) and hyphen is very rarly used (to not have problem with minus).
baStudlyCase was *never* about saving space. It was copied from Smalltalk by people who failed to realise that Smalltalk did it that way because the Smalltalk character set didn't _have_ an underscore. Nor is being "uncommon" the issue.
For example: - Java - camel cases both in classes and methods (convention very similar to Haskell)
which is why I have something similar to my little hspp tool for reading and writing Java. The fact that other people do something ill-considered is no reason why we have to follow them. Your own list of languages shows that baStudlyCase is not universal. For that matter, the Interlisp and S convention was to separate words in an identifier with dots. (once again, every runTogetherWord inThisMessage is flagged as a spelling mistake...) Thanks to GHC's -F and -pgmF options, people can now choose whether to writeInAnUnreadableAndUglyStyle or not. Brilliant!