From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.4.4 (2020-01-24) on polar.synack.me X-Spam-Level: ** X-Spam-Status: No, score=2.1 required=5.0 tests=BAYES_20,INVALID_MSGID, REPLYTO_WITHOUT_TO_CC autolearn=no autolearn_force=no version=3.4.4 X-Google-Language: ENGLISH,ASCII-7-bit X-Google-Thread: 103376,768ec7d79291ed2c X-Google-Attributes: gid103376,public From: Jerry Petrey Subject: Re: IDENTIFIERS in Upper Case Date: 1997/03/28 Message-ID: <333BCDE9.176C@mlb.cca.rockwell.com>#1/1 X-Deja-AN: 229010957 References: <1997Mar26.185431.12742@nosc.mil> <333AB9A0.7284@grammatech.com> Organization: Rockwell Collins Avionics Reply-To: gdp@mlb.cca.rockwell.com Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada Date: 1997-03-28T00:00:00+00:00 List-Id: Matthew Heaney wrote: > > In Guidelines for Enterprise-Wide GUI Design, authors Susan Weinschenk and > Sarah C. Yeo state that "Sentances in all capital letters are 20 percent > more difficult to read than sentences with upper- and lower-case letters. > Avoid using all caps for large blocks of text." [p. 101] They later state, > when discussing online help, that one should "Never use all caps, except > for acronyms and initializations. Words in all caps are harder to read." > [p. 144] > > In Usability Engineering, author Jakob Nielsen states that "On alphanumeric > terminals, UPPERCASE TEXT CASE CAN ALSO BE USED TO GET THE USERS' > ATTENTION, but upper case should be used sparingly as it is about 10% > slower to read than mixed-case text." [p. 118-9] > > In Principles and Guidelines in Software User Interface Design, author > Deborah J. Mayhew states "Avoid heavy use of all-uppercase letters. Text > in all uppercase is more difficult to read than text in mixed case. Tullis > (1988) reviews literature suggesting that people read mixed case text about > 13% faster than uppercase. This is because lowercase letters look more > different from one another than do uppercase letters, making it easier to > determine a word in part by its overall shape." [p. 469] > The problem with most of the studies is that they address the effect of case in normal human reading - we don't read programs in the same way we read a novel. IMO, programmers can adapt quite well to most any reasonable case style. The key thing is separating identifers and key words to bring out the structure (I still find all uppercase identifiers work well for that but the mixed case style seems to be more preferred today, so I adapt). There are many other factors that have a much greater influence on readability of programs, e.g. use of white space, a good indentation scheme, good choices of names, etc. Most important is some reasonable guidelines within an organization and a consistent use of those guidelines. Expecting the entire Ada (or any other language) community to adhere to the same guidelines would be nice but not realistic - conformity within an organization is probably the best we can achieve. Jerry -- ===================================================================== == Jerry Petrey == == Consultant Software Engineer - Member Team Ada and Team Forth == == Rockwell Collins Commercial Avionics Group == == Melbourne, FL email: gdp@mlb.cca.rockwell.com == =====================================================================