Re: Looking for good Ada95 book

[mfeldman@seas.gwu.edu (Michael Feldman)]

In article <dewar.847671101@merv>, Robert Dewar <dewar@merv.cs.nyu.edu> wrote:

>world is that it is a remnant of the notion of stropping in Algol. In Algol
>and Algol60, keywords are in boldface, and a way has to be found to indicate
>this. A common choice was to use upper case to represent bold, and that
>common style in Algol-60 was imported into the Pascal world.

Correct. And many Pascal authors stuck with it because it works well
with beginners, especially if you want the printed code to look just
like the code the students see and write on terminals.

>Mike, I know you think I am making a big deal out of a very small point, but
>that IS the point, I do NOT think that consistency in style across the
>Ada community is a small point at all, and I am not alone in this thinking.

I find it interesting that out of a couple of dozen reviewers of the
two books we are discussing, NONE objected to the upper-case reserved
words. These were not Ada dummies; they saw the logic behind what I was
doing, and went along with it. Every reviewer was an active teacher of
Ada in intro courses.

>I well remember a Tri-Ada at which one of the plenary speakers said that one
>of his major objections to Ada was the habit of using upper case identifiers,
>and there was *huge* applause. Now of course we are not talking about
>UPPER_CASE_IDENTIFIERS here but just upper case BEGIN END etc, but I think
>you will find a lot of Ada programmers find this upper case keyword style
>highly distatesful. 

So they do not have to use it, just because a couple of intro books do.
Nobody is forcing them, and even the most elementary prettyprinter
(or even a decent editor macro) can change the case of reserved words
anyway.

>Others don't think it matters much.

I think it matters in dealing with first-term students. If the community
is THAT outraged, I'll certainly consider changing it in the next edition.
Obviously it won;t happen till then; one doesn;t make that kind of change
"on the fly".

>What is a little unusual about Mike's position is that he thinks it is
>a small point, but is still adamant in insisting on using this nonstandard
>style in his books. Mike, you are allowed to be insistent on your position,
>but if you are insistent, then surely it is NOT such a small point :-)

It's a small point in the larger community; I maintain it is a helpful
style for first-year students.

Mike Feldman