[Tagging] service=drive-through or drive_through?

[Anthony]

On Mon, Jul 4, 2011 at 10:43 AM, Eugene Alvin Villar <seav80 at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Mon, Jul 4, 2011 at 9:45 PM, Anthony <osm at inbox.org> wrote:
>> On Mon, Jul 4, 2011 at 9:34 AM, Eugene Alvin Villar <seav80 at gmail.com> wrote:
>>> Our tagging system (at least for formal values) generally uses English
>>> words, but the syntax is not English grammar. Anyone with an good
>>> programming background would immediately recognize how the formal keys
>>> and values have been constructed: lowercase letters and with
>>> underscores and using colons to provide a "namespace".
>>
>> I have a programming background, and I thought (and still think) that
>> underscore represents a space, not a random character.
>
> Underscore does usually represent a space in programming languages but
> it may also represents other characters that would otherwise not be
> allowed in names of variables, functions, etc., like hyphens, slashes,
> periods, etc.

I don't deny that the underscore can be used in a programming language
to represent a hyphen.  I was denying that "Anyone with an good
programming background would immediately recognize how the formal keys
and values have been constructed".  In fact, you don't even elaborate
on how the formal keys and values have been constructed other than to
assert that hyphens are replaced with underscores (something which
would *not* be "immediately recognized", as this is only done in a
small number of cases, and even in those small number of cases it
isn't always even apparent without doing research that a hyphen was
correct in the first place).

I'm all for consistency and standards.  But that means we should come
up with a formal, standardized naming scheme.  And if we're going to
do that, I see no reason not to include hyphens, nor to replace
characters other than spaces with underscores.