[Go] underscore in root terms

[Midori Harris]

Hi Doug,

I dredged up a thread in the email archive where you asked the same 
question back in Sept. 2006. At the time, the few of us who responded said 
we could remove them, as long as we gave sufficient warning. Chris said:

   I'd give out a suitable warning before modifying. I agree the underscore
   is ugly and inconsistent. However, it may be the case there are people
   plopping the root name as a surrogate for the ontology name (obo
   namespace) in a space-delimited file somewhere.

   Also, changing _ to ' ' would result in the root name being different
   from the ontology name (obo namespaces can't have spaces in them). A
   minor detail but it may have consequences for someone.

Then it stalled because we didn't get around to deciding how much notice 
to give, and no one remembered to send an alert email. I can send a 
message now, announcing that we'll change in two weeks (what I'll do is 
swap the names with existing underscore-free exact synonyms).

midori

On Wed, 3 Jun 2009, Doug Howe wrote:

> Is there a technical reason why there is an underscore in the names of the 
> root terms, but not in any other terms in GO?  This appears arbitrary and 
> means special handling for displays.
> -Doug
>
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