Underscore nomenclature

[damon-kwok]

Use underscore nomenclature to replace variable and method names with littlecamel-case nomenclature.
The pony code on the right is more beautiful. See:

[bradcray]

Hi @damon-kwok — Would you clarify what you are proposing we do here in order to address and close this issue?

[damon-kwok]

@bradcray If possible, add naming constraints to the chapel compiler.

[bradcray]

It's possible, but not something I think we would turn on by default. Personally, at least, I'm not a big fan of having languages impose naming constraints, as I think it's something a project's authors should decide for themselves given that different programmers prefer different styles (obviously). Where things get trickier is with the standard libraries where, as you've probably seen, we've been using camelCase fairly consistently, and I think it would be too difficult/painful for users if we were to change now. So I suspect that the best bet here would be to have the compiler support style flags like --enforce-underscore-style or --enforce-camelCase-style that would be applied to all user modules (we also talk about other styles that one may want to enforce through compiler flags like "force me to give types to my procedure's arguments" or "force me to avoid using try!".

See also issues #6698 and #7417, which are related.

[damon-kwok]

@bradcray Sound good! THANKS~

[bradcray]

If you would like to open an issue specifically requesting such style-enforcement flags, please feel free to.