Re: Language Choice and Coding style

[rav@goanna.cs.rmit.edu.au (++ robin)]

	ok@goanna.cs.rmit.EDU.AU (Richard A. O'Keefe) writes:

	>smize@Starbase.NeoSoft.COM (Samuel Mize) writes:
	>>My best understanding: In The Beginning, all we had was punched cards
	>>and simple teletype interfaces, so everything was all capitals.  That's
	>>all there were.  Also, compiler table-space was tight, so 6-character
	>>or 8-character identifier limits were common.

	>How soon they forget.
	>(a) COBOL has always allowed hyphens in identifiers, e.g.
	>	COMPUTE-WEEKLY-PAYROLL
	>    It's one of the oldest surviving programming languages.

	>(b) PL/I had two encodings (the "48-character set" and the "6-character
---								     ?
---That's the 60-character set.

	>    set").  The 60-character coding had the underscore.  Where I used it,
	>    it was considered good PL/I style to use the underscore.  The ANSI
	>    PL/I standard is 1976, but the language is older than that.

---Yes, that's about 1966 when it first came out.

	>(c) The third oldest computer I have ever seen in operation (the other
	>    two were an IBM 650 and an IBM 1620) was an IBM 1130.  It had an
	>    APL keyboard.  APL uses underlines.

	>(e) Algol 60 and Algol 68 both allowed identifiers of any length, and
	>    both handled multi-word identifiers by allowing embedded spaces.
	>    E.g.
	>	'FOR' EMPLOYEE NUMBER := 1 'STEP' 1 'UNTIL' LAST EMPLOYEE 'DO'
	>	    WEEKLY PAYROLL[EMPLOYEE NUMBER] := 0;

	>>Once lower case and longer identifiers became available, some people
	>>started writing longer identifiers, while others stayed with the older
	>>trs style.  This is where IdentifiersLikeThis came from.

	>>I think this was first common in Pascal.  I don't think Pascal had
	>>underscores in identifiers, I may be wrong.

	>The old Pascal standard didn't (because the CDC character set lacked 'em).
	>UCSD Pascal allowed underscores but ignored them.
	>The new Pascal standard (10206) allows them.

	>Smalltalk didn't use underscores, because it was developed before the 1967
	>version of ASCII; the 1963 version of ASCII had a left arrow where the
	>underscore is now.

	>>Underscores also take a little more effort to type

	>That depends entirely on which keybaord you are using.
	>On the IBM 029 keypunches that I wrote Fortran, Burroughs Algol,
	>and PL/I in, it was very easy to type underscores.

	>>especially if
	>>you're not a good touch typist.  So, the MixedCase identifier is
	>>still common in some quarters.

	>This is ludicrous.  It is _harder_ to type 
	>	FooBarUgh
	>(because it requires *three* case shifts) than
	>	foo_bar_ugh
	>(because it requires only *two* case shifts).  And in an age of mutable
	>keymaps it is even sillier.