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It’s odd that the author does not mention the truly ridiculous thing about underscores: they are a holdover from typewriters, where they were used to provide underlining by overstriking. The fact that we now have beautiful proportional-width screen fonts that support underlining—and do not generally support overstriking—makes underscores unnecessary.

And yet we insist that a programmer be able to write every modern programming language on a 50-year-old typewriter. You know, just in case.




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