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=-1.3 required=5.0 tests=BAYES_00,INVALID_MSGID autolearn=no autolearn_force=no version=3.4.4 X-Google-Language: ENGLISH,ASCII-7-bit X-Google-Thread: 109fba,d95b511473b3a931 X-Google-Attributes: gid109fba,public X-Google-Thread: 1014db,d95b511473b3a931 X-Google-Attributes: gid1014db,public X-Google-Thread: 103376,d95b511473b3a931 X-Google-Attributes: gid103376,public From: adam@irvine.com (Adam Beneschan) Subject: Re: Language Choice and Coding style Date: 1996/06/27 Message-ID: <4quk22$78@krusty.irvine.com>#1/1 X-Deja-AN: 162429290 references: organization: /z/news/newsctl/organization newsgroups: comp.lang.ada,comp.lang.c,comp.lang.c++ Date: 1996-06-27T00:00:00+00:00 List-Id: In article 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