title: SET-SOMETHING vs SOMETHING! description: SET-SOMETHING better looks in the manual page, but in real code SOMETHING! looks better. This is because ! and @ are special symbols easily distinguished by the eye, while the word SET is not a special symbol, at least visually. Since we care first of all about code, we must choose SOMETHING! . In addition, a match for SET-SOMETHING is GET-SOMETHING, these two words are different by only one letter. So the characters "ET-" carry no information.