Re: Proposal: allow @, $, !, and ? in Lua identifiers

[steve donovan <steve.j.donovan@...>]

On Fri, Apr 25, 2014 at 2:13 PM, Coroutines <coroutines@gmail.com> wrote:
> Ruby also makes it convention to put ! at the end of the function name
> if if modifies its `self'.  The non-! version returns a modified copy.

That's a fine convention, but then everyone must use the convention
consistently and idiomatically.  An enormous amount of code must then
be rewritten.  It's an option for a new language, but not for a
twenty-year old.

The situation IMHO is better handled with good documentation
practices.  In static languages, people can pretend that entities
don't need documentation since they have explicit types [1]. In
dynamic languages, documentation takes over the role of static type
annotations, at least in an informal way. Not mentioning copy/original
is then a documentation bug.[2]

As for the other characters, well perhaps we'll think of a better use
for them?  My concern is that people will use them willy-nilly,
because they look Cool....

[1] and everyone agrees that tautological documentation ("add(x,y):
adds x and y") is worse than none at all.  JavaDoc made this style
popular.
[2] if the docs are available at your fingertips, doubleplusgood - but
that's an environment/editor issue