From: david@... Date: 2005-08-03T22:52:33+09:00 Subject: Re: Style question: when to use underscores Cit�t "francisrammeloo@hotmail.com" : > > But the Ruby built in classes > do not always use them. > For example: IO#readlines > Why not: IO#read_lines ? > I find that to be very rare in the standard libs, and almost exclusively when the library in question is a relatively thin C binding. In that specific case, I prefer to iterate over the lines of a file to avoid loading the whole thing into memory. It's a habit you get into the first time you do a script working with 200MB log files ;) For the love of god, resist the urge to use PascalCase or CamelCase for method names, or more insane conventions like the one with defining and calling methods reflexively (abandon all hope of an eventual Rite optimizing that). Almost the whole core API and all of the standard lib I've used so far uses underscores everywhere, both of the style guides recommend doing that, and that's reason enough to do so. A convention should always take preference over personal taste. Side note: minor snags go to the Python standard lib for using every possible convention, not so minor fluffs go to the wxRuby people for ruby-izing the method names, although I'd welcome the get_foo and set_foo methods to be made into proper accessors while it's still morally acceptable to cause that much breakage. David