Potential side-effects associated with a dash in a package/class name?

Question

Common practice for naming packages and classes seems to be, using regex-like notation:

[a-z][a-z0-9]*

In other words, the name usually starts by a lowercase letter, followed by any sequence of lowercase letters and digits.

However, some packages (e.g. tikz-3dplot) and classes (e.g. revtex4-1) contain a - in their name. I am myself tempted to use a dash in the name of one of my packages. Is that wise? Aside from perhaps inconveniencing some users by deviating from naming conventions...

... Are there potential side-effects associated with using a dash in a package/class name?

Answer 1

It should be OK: any normal ASCII value. The main thing to watch out for is punctuation characters that babel uses for shorthands, although mostly babel does that after \begin{document} these days so even those should not affect package names.

Also avoid characters that are special in the underlying kpathsea library for example " is used to delimit files with spaces in their names and optionally file names starting | are treated as a shell command to execute. It's probably best to avoid those.

Finally, avoid spaces or commas as they would seriously mess up the \usepackage parsing. You can input a file called array,longtable.sty into TeX but \usepackage{array,longtable} isn't going to work.