What's the Trailing Underscore in Elm?

Variables such as model_, with a trailing underscore, are allowed and conventional in Elm. If you're familiar with a language where _model can mean an unused variable, this can cause a double-take. The trailing underscore is a nod to Haskell, telling us the variable is related, or similar, to a prior variable.

Here's an example: model_ is the argument of the update function in the Elm architecture, and model is the updated model we'll return:

> model_ = { start = "now" }
{ start = "now" } : { start : String }
> model = { model_ | start = "tomorrow" }
{ start = "tomorrow" } : { start : String }

This Stack Overflow answer summarizes the convention:

https://stackoverflow.com/a/5673954/2112512

A single quote (model') was used similarly in the past; that syntax was deprecated in Elm 0.18. Here's a GitHub issue describing that decision:

https://github.com/elm-lang/elm-plans/issues/4

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