On Sat, 21 Feb 2004 00:56:00 +0900, Jim Freeze <jim / freeze.org> wrote:
>For me, but I don't think that will fly for everyone else
>in the company. I was looking for a more concrete reason.

How about because using lowercase for instance variable names is a
Ruby idiom? 

Here's a quote from _The Practice of Programming_ by Brian Kernighan
and Rob Pike: "Like natural languages, programming languages have
idioms, conventional ways that experienced programmers write common
pieces of code. A central part of learning any language is developing
a familiarity with its idioms."

K. and P. go on to explain that _not_ respecting a language's idioms
makes programs harder to understand and masks bugs. Therefore we
should adopt recognized conventions instead of making up new ones.