Re: Language Choice and Coding style

[john@assen.demon.co.uk (John McCabe)]

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ian@rsd.bel.alcatel.be (Ian Ward) wrote:

<..snip..>

>Sorry, John mate, I was just being facetious, I seem to have been
>in that sort of mood for the last couple of weeks. :-)

Not to worry, I was just being a bit silly!

>My point was that if I had been reading and writing English, for
>the whole of my life, such that it was my mother tongue, then 
>picking out the words from a long string of characters would
>probably be easy. If, however, I was using English at work, 
>simply because it is easier for a multi-country project to work
>in one language, then I may not be so good at picking out
>the word boundaries, and help would be appreciated.

I agree, however I find there is a major difference between programs
written LIKE_THIS and programs written Like_This. I have a serious
preference for the latter, even ones written like_this would be much
better. My reasoning for this is that if you are writing English (or
any other language for that matter), you don't write it all in upper
case, mainly because much of what you read is actually interpreted
from the shape of the word rather than the letters in it. That's
something I noticed just before I had my eyes tested, I could read
things because I recognised the shape of the word, but if I tried to
read each letter in turn, I couldn't!

Perhaps this is a good thing in programming in that it makes you pay
more attention to what is written, and therefore to make less
mistakes, but I don't think it works that way. I think you are just as
likely to make the same mistakes, but because you can't use the shape
of the word as a guide, you are likely to take longer to find those
mistooks :-)

My main gripe about the whole thing (to do with the Germans forcing us
to write LIKE_THIS and to use the TLD Ada compiler) is that none of it
was done on a sound technical background: I think the PA guys decided
on the way the software should be written, and the financial guys got
a good (sic) deal with TLD so Q.E.D.

>This situation could be solved, however, if the members of 
>all countries, no matter their language, romantic, germanic,
>or otherwise, all started to use the same word for newly 
>invented things. 

Good idea, and it certainly happens, look at radiator for example. The
French is radiateur n'est ce pas? I had to laugh once when I was
visiting Fokker in the Netherlands on business. We had a load of
computers connected via a LAN which could also carry voice (typical
ESA project EGSE). I was listening on headphones to all these Dutch
test guys apparently speaking gobbledegook (?) when all of a sudden
the phrase "peak power meter" came through in the middle of it all. It
came as a bit of a surprise.

>Like, say, AIDS. If everybody in the world ignored the fact that
>it was an acronym, and just called it "aids", as was it named by it's
>discoverers. Then, if for then next fifty years, people did this
>with each new thing or activity that was discovered, the languages
>of the world would converge. Then there would be no problems
>with communication.

>This will never happen though, as a new Germanic, or Fran<sp>ckish
>word is invented to describe it.

Yes, like SIDA!

>Yes, I agree that syndr�me invent� pour decourager les
>amoureux wasn't discovered in Los Angeles, (or even 
>called that) which is my other point; that the English
>speaking community do the same thing. We are all as
>bad as each other.



Best Regards
John McCabe <john@assen.demon.co.uk>