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From: bketcham@u.washington.edu (Benjamin Ketcham)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada
Subject: Re: Easily-Read C++?
Date: 6 Oct 1994 02:20:29 GMT
Organization: University of Washington, Seattle
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Date: 1994-10-06T02:20:29+00:00
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In article <36ui0u$4dg@gnat.cs.nyu.edu>, Robert Dewar <dewar@cs.nyu.edu> wrote:
>Maybe the C line should be
>
>  p(j,b,t)
>
>since it seems out of style to use those long names :-)

Robert:

You'd be a lot easier to take seriously (and since you are obviously
very knowledgeable I believe that taking you seriously is generally
a good idea) if you could resist the temptation to jump on every
opportunity to make gratuitous and unwarranted jabs at C/C++.  Not
everyone who reads this newsgroup is a completely dedicated and rabid
Ada zealot who sees no utility whatever in any other language, so be
careful about assuming you are preaching to the converted.  (I could
make a jab of my own about Ada right here, but I won't.)

The irony is, if I'm not highly mistaken, I think I've heard you
yourself complain from time to time about the poor signal/noise ratio
in this very newsgroup due to "language-bashing".

I guess you haven't looked at much X11 code if you think C programmers
like to use short names!  Personally, I almost wonder whether problems
might arise occasionally due to names that do not differ within the
guaranteed minimum-significant number of characters (32, is it?)....

Sure, *some* C programmers use illegibly-short names, just as probably
*some* Ada programmers don't do enough thinking about program design
and robustness because they assume the compiler will protect them.  If
the former are the rule, rather than the exception, in your universe,
then perhaps we just live in different universes.

--ben

PS:  I don't have a problem with

    ++really_long_and_descriptive_variable_name;

It certainly looks better to me than

    really_long_and_descriptive_variable_name := really_long_and_descriptive_variable_name + 1;

(Geez, had to use the editor to facilitate writing that last bit, and
if you really believe that it's more readable than the first one,
particularly if it were in a "real-world" context where there might
be dozens of variables beginning with, e.g., "really_long_and_", then
I'll just have to respectfully decline to agree.)