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, MSGID_RANDY autolearn=no autolearn_force=no version=3.4.4 X-Google-Language: ENGLISH,ASCII-7-bit X-Google-Thread: 103376,30e3597af28a3026 X-Google-Attributes: gid103376,public From: Ted Dennison Subject: Re: Simple algorithmic question I hope :-) Date: 1999/10/28 Message-ID: <7va4ns$898$1@nnrp1.deja.com>#1/1 X-Deja-AN: 541693726 References: <7uuuba$8s4$1@nnrp1.deja.com> <19991025071337.29192.00000857@ng-fa1.aol.com> <7v255q$eth$1@nnrp1.deja.com> X-Http-Proxy: 1.0 x41.deja.com:80 (Squid/1.1.22) for client 204.48.27.130 Organization: Deja.com - Before you buy. X-Article-Creation-Date: Thu Oct 28 18:30:20 1999 GMT X-MyDeja-Info: XMYDJUIDtedennison Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada X-Http-User-Agent: Mozilla/4.6 [en] (WinNT; I) Date: 1999-10-28T00:00:00+00:00 List-Id: In article , aidan@skinner.demon.co.uk wrote: > On Mon, 25 Oct 1999 20:51:28 GMT, Robert A Duff 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. Sent via Deja.com http://www.deja.com/ Before you buy.