Re: Language Choice and Coding style

[adam@irvine.com (Adam Beneschan)]

In article <dewar.835537168@schonberg> dewar@cs.nyu.edu (Robert Dewar) writes:
 >James said
 >
 >"  Except for the "Hungarian notation" silliness, the idea of
 >spellingVariableNamesLikeThis was originally a Smalltalk and/or Pascal
 >idiom, and it has become nearly universal in GUI libraries (again I
 >think because of Smalltalk's influence).  C programmers use variable names
 >
 >
 >I really think this is Pascal influence rather than Smalltalk influence,
 >since it predates the Smalltalk craze. Remember that Pascal had an
 >out-of-proportion influence on PC's because of Turbo-Pascal. The Microsoft
 >interfaces, on which many C programmers grow up, are Pascal derived (they
 >even used Pascal calling sequences, and needed special treatment from C
 >to get the calling sequence right). As I said in an earlier message, I
 >trace the StyleOfSmashingWordsTogetherWhichIDoNotLike to UCSD Pascal.

UCSD Pascal had a TURTLEGRAPHICS package for teaching graphics to
beginning programmers.  (We called it TURKEYGRAPHICS because it
gobbled up memory.)  It was very simple conceptually; you could move a
cursor around the screen, and you had a "pen" that you could raise or
lower--if the pen was down, moving the cursor would cause lines to be
drawn along the screen.

Lore has it that the UCSD Pascal code for TURTLEGRAPHICS had a Boolean
variable that would, in Ada, be written as Pen_Is_Down.  Another
variable was called Go_On.  Neither one looks very appealing when
written in all-capital letters with no underscores.  This might have
been one reason UCSD adopted the smashed-together mixed-case style
(also called "pseudo-Germanic", probably because the German language
sometimes forms nouns by smashing several words together).  This was
the best they could do, since Pascal doesn't allow underscores in
identifiers (UCSD Pascal actually did, but it was a non-standard
extension nobody used).

                                -- Adam