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Comment by bakli | Hacker News Reader

Is that where Ruby took it from?

No, they both got it from Common Lisp (ca 1984)

Is that a Common Lisp thing or something that predates the ANSI standard? SBCL doesn't like that syntax:

  * 10_000
  
  debugger invoked on a UNBOUND-VARIABLE: The variable |10_000| is unbound.

According to the Common Lisp HyperSpec, "_" is an alphabetic constituent character:

Rather, perhaps, Ada 83.