Re: Simple algorithmic question I hope :-)

[Ted Dennison <dennison@telepath.com>]

In article <slrn81bp1a.1bb.aidan@skinner.demon.co.uk>,
  aidan@skinner.demon.co.uk wrote:
> On Mon, 25 Oct 1999 20:51:28 GMT, Robert A Duff
<bobduff@world.std.com> wrote:
>
> >Speak for yourself.  I'm sick and tired of reading discussions about
> >how to capitalize Ada, and I think it makes Ada folks look like a
> >bunch of nitpicking pedants, who have nothing better to do than ...
>
> Given the number of posts to the team-ada mailing list thinking it's
> about *either* the American Dental Associatian *or* the American
> Disabilities Assoc. I think that the capitalisation is

Putting on my ameteur psychoanalist cap (a rather bizzare-looking
fedora, if you must know), I think there's much more to it than that.

In the early days of computing, language names tended to be acronyms.
Perhaps part of this had to do with the larger hand the US DoD used to
have in the development of languages, as they tend to be overly fond of
acronyms. Whatever the reason, sometime around the introduction of
Pascal the fashion changed. Now languages tend to be named after people
or things.

Anyway, I think a lot of readers here tend to be innundated in RL by
hecklers who like to misapprehend Ada as an old, obsolete military
language, with no significance in today's world. Often such folks tend
to insist on capitalizing it "ADA". So its a sort of knee-jerk reaction
to immediately "correct" anyone who uses "ADA" instead of Ada.

But is this reaction reasonable? Well, now lets turn our attention to
the "ADA" poster. *Why* did he capitalize it this way?

Could it be that he just naturally assumes all languages he doesn't know
well are capitalized that way? Well, if he's an undergrad student, he
was probably born in the 1977-1981 time frame. He wasn't around when
acronym languages were fashionable. The vast majority of languages he
has been exposed to would have been capitialized in the modern way. A
sensible default, knowing nothing else, would be that it is capitalized
"Ada". So that can't be it.

Could he have gotten that impression from looking at the front covers of
available literature? Often they will capitalize whole words on book
covers for stylistic reasons. Wirth's Oberon book does that. Well, I
don't claim to have a complete collection. But my manager is a bit of a
book-hound, so we have 13 different Ada (83 & 95) titiles here,
including both versions of the LRM. Not *one* of them uses all caps,
(although one did use all lower-case :-) ). That can't be it either.

The only thing we are left with is that he somehow made a mental
association with Ada that placed it in the same class as the acronym
languages he knows about (most likely, FORTRAN and COBOL). That means he
is suffering under the misapprehension listed above.

Now, assuming that is the case, I'd argue that it would be quite
appropriate to try to correct this misimpression right off the bat. Not
only is that attitude somewhat insulting to Ada, but it will color that
person's thinking in a way that will inhibit truly learning the
language. Ada is in fact a quite modern language. Trying to think of it
in terms of old languages that don't have to worry about things like
stacks, namespaces, nested subprograms, and concurrecnty, is going to
cause the poor poster no end of troubles.

--
T.E.D.


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