[swift-evolution] SE-0025: Scoped Access Level, next steps

[Chris Lattner]

> On Mar 25, 2016, at 6:34 AM, John Siracusa via swift-evolution <swift-evolution at swift.org> wrote:
> 
> Thanks for the explanation. I think this last part gets at the heart of my question: Why isn't it important to highlight word boundaries in this case?
> 
> On Fri, Mar 25, 2016 at 1:24 AM, Chris Lattner <clattner at apple.com <mailto:clattner at apple.com>> wrote:
> Swift is an “opinionated” language and we find snake case to be ugly (YMMV of course).
> 
> My attempt to summarize/rephrase the overall answer: "We used up all the word-boundary-highlighting conventions that we don't find ugly on other parts of the language, and we don't want to reuse any of them due to the potential for conflict and confusion.”

I’m sorry for the confusion.  There are two issues: whether it is important to highlight word boundaries, and if so, what approach to use.  The first (and longer) part of the email was intended to justify why we don’t highlight word boundaries for keywords.  My overly snarky answer at the end was an attempt to answer why we don’t use snake case, but it wasn’t very effective :-)

Here is a different way to look at it: if we were going to highlight word boundaries, we would do it with camel case.  We use camel case in other places, and it has advantages over snake case (shorter identifiers), so we wouldn’t introduce a new way to do it.  

> As for snake case being ugly, my mileage does vary (obviously). Ithink thereadability costofnot highlightingwordboundaries outweighsthe aestheticconcerns. But them's the breaks when it comes to aesthetic issues, I suppose. And in the grand scheme of things, at least the total number of declaration modifiers should be small… :)

I understand the concern.  The short version of the argument is that multiword keywords and declmodifiers are rare , primitive, and used in idiomatic ways so the opportunity for confusion is low.

-Chris

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