Thomas Sawyer wrote:
> Suraj Kurapati wrote:
> 
>>> Just personal preference of course. I'm don't think there is any true 
>>> rationale for one over the other.
>> 
>> I beg to differ and I think there is a rationale (see above).
> 
> Never_the_less this is English, a close relative of German, and in these 
> languages conjoined words are common_place.

Good point and excellent illustration!  Until seeing your example, I 
never realized how well underscores flow with text, in comparison to 
hyphens:

  nevertheless  vs.  never-the-less  vs.  never_the_less  vs. 
neverTheLess
  commonplace   vs.  common-place    vs.  common_place    vs. 
commonPlace

Of all the typographic conventions listed in the above example, I 
heavily prefer snake_case, which is thankfully prevalent in Ruby.  This 
is one aspect of Ruby that I found very attractive, compared to, say, 
Python, where the firstconventionintheaboveexample is prevalent.  (A 
personal preference, I agree.)

Generally speaking, it's surprising that a better typographic convention 
would arise from computer science rather than from literature.  Perhaps 
we may someday find that, in the increasingly digital future, people 
would begin using under_scores as an alternative to the traditional 
process of compound words being initially hyphenated (e.g. under-score) 
and later not hyphenated (e.g. underscore).

Cheers.
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