From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.4.5-pre1 (2020-06-20) on ip-172-31-74-118.ec2.internal X-Spam-Level: X-Spam-Status: No, score=-1.9 required=3.0 tests=BAYES_00 autolearn=ham autolearn_force=no version=3.4.5-pre1 Date: 9 May 92 15:52:06 GMT From: pattis@beaver.cs.washington.edu (Richard Pattis) Subject: Re: Ada Quality and Style Guide Message-ID: <1992May9.155206.2278@beaver.cs.washington.edu> List-Id: I asked a question like this about 6 months ago. I'd like to summarize what I heard before voting gets too far along. People tend to fall into two groups: (1) Those who think reserved words should stand out and be easy to spot because they quickly outline the key points of a program. They cite the LRM as using boldface as confirmation of their belief. Because boldface is not available on most terminals and listings, they advocate using upper-case reserved words to meet the same goal. (2) Those who think reserved words should not stand out because they distract attention from the more important things: programmer-defined words. They cite the LRM as using lower-case as confirmation of their belief. Actually there seem to be three classes of Ada identifiers: reserved, predefined, and programmer-defined. Some group reserved and predefined together (both have default meanings, whether changable or not); others group predefined and programmer defined together, since the programmer can define the meaning of each (whether predefined or not). The final question is the use of underscores and capitalization. In Pascal, upper-case letters were the only way to signal the start of new words: ScarCity vs. Scarcity. Some believe using underscores and upper-case is redundant, although most would allow it in cases like People_and_Places. The use of capitals for abbreviation and acronyms makes this the murkiest issue. Finally, there are some other capitalization conventions I've seen that I like: e.g., using the case of the first word to indicate whether an identifier is local to a subprogram or not (extended to local to a package or not, when USE is present). Such conventions may be too detailed for a general standard. Rich -- ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Richard E. Pattis "Programming languages are like Department of Computer Science pizzas - they come in only "too" and Engineering sizes: too big and too small."