A makeshift preprocessor written say in Perl could be used to replace the embedded hyphens with underscores thereby making them synonyms. A list of ways in which hyphens are used in the language will need to be developed so they may be distinguished. You don't want a single line comment sign being taken as containing an embedded hyphen. If done properly it shouldn't cause any problems. It will allow you to side step having to actually modify the language and may be portable across language implementations. I use the C language preprocessor to correct a number of features of the C language syntax that I find ugly.