Silliness (was: Looking for good Ada95 book)

[adam@irvine.com (Adam Beneschan)]

Robert Dewar wrote:

> In the case of Ada, the original RM encouraged an ALL_CAPS style for
> identifiers that many adopted, but many found intolerable because they
> FELT IT WAS LIKE SHOUTING! 

Gee, this thread is making me feel old.  Old, because I used to work
as a COBOL programmer, back when our programs had to be put in on
punch cards, which couldn't handle lower case at all.  So from having
to work for three years with listings that were constantly shouting at
me, I should have gone deaf years ago.

But then again, the programs never seemed like they were shouting,
because COBOL programmers were always polite and put periods at the
end of their sentences.  Even when we got mad and wanted to end our
sentences with an exclamation point, or two or nine, 

    ADD A TO B GIVING C, DAMMIT!!!!!!!!!

the compiler would never accept this, always sending us back error
messages like "Don't raise your voice with me or I'm going to reject
your whole program".  So we kept ourselves in check and programmed
politely, even though we had to program in loud voices due to a
deficiency in the computer's auditory system that prevented it from
hearing lower-case.

On the other hand, Ada programmers tend to end all their statements
with semicolons, which means they aren't really statements at all,
since a semicolon implies that there's a second half of the sentence
coming up; but that never seems to happen in Ada.  You can read a
whole program and keep seeing semicolons, which means there's more to
come, but then you hit the last semicolon and there's nothing more
after it and you end up wondering, did the programmer intend to say
something more and just forget?  So you're just left there hanging.
Oh, well.  I suppose there are worse things; after all, ending a
sentence with a semicolon isn't half as wishy-washy as ending one with
an ellipsis . . .

:)
                                -- Adam