Really just a matter of convention, and dash is too heavily associated with minus. A single underscore is a permissible variable name in some languages; in Go

Really just a matter of convention, and dash is too heavily associated with minus. A single underscore is a permissible variable name in some languages; in Go it has a special meaning (blank identifier). Would a single dash be as well? For example, how would you interpret i - - Is it i (minus) (variable named dash)? And is `i--` a legitimate variable name? Maybe Ruby doesn't have this construct, but then it would have a completely different naming contention from existing languages.