Re: Language Choice and Coding style

[jmatthews@nova.wright.edu (Dr. John B. Matthews)]

In article <dewar.835406503@schonberg>, dewar@cs.nyu.edu (Robert Dewar) writes:
> Nasser asks
> 
> "SO, why do you think this difference exist between the 2 groups of
> programmers? It seems to be getting worse with time. I remmember
> starting to first see ThisTypeOfWritingOfCode around 1985-1986 time
> frame, I dont think I saw this before but I can be wrong. So the
> question is really, what did happen in 1985-1986 to cause this?"
> 
> This style of separating words with upper case and no break characters
> is I think derived from the Pascal world (for example it was the UCSD
> style). Micrsoft derived much of their standard interfaces from this
> world, as of course did Borland, so I suspect the importation of this
> style into C++ comes from this source).

Apple was one of the first to license UCSD Pascal from the
university regents (Softech was the other). At that time, the Apple
II was upper-case only, and the mixed case style wasn't apparent in
Apple code until the the advent of the Apple //e in 1981, with its
full upper & lower case keyboard and display. The style was firmly
entrenched in the original object oriented Pascal derivative,
Classcal, and the early Mac Pascal compilers by 1983. The Inside
Macintosh books of 1984 show the mixed style throughout: init cap
for units (packages), procedures and functions; init lower for
constants and variables. Microsoft, one of the largest early Mac
developers after Apple, adopted the style (along with interface:-)

The style clash became singularly apparent when we began writing
bindings and porting sample code to the Mac/MachTen implementation
of GNAT. The only thing many adherents of one style or the other
can agree on is that mixing the two is worse:-)

John
----------------------------------------------------------------
Dr. John B. Matthews
jmathews@nova.wright.edu; john_matthews@ccmail.dayton.saic.com
"Whom the gods would destroy, they first invite to program in C"