Re: IDENTIFIERS in Upper Case

["Graham C. Hughes" <graham.hughes@resnet.ucsb.edu>]

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>>>>> "Robert" == Robert Dewar <dewar@merv.cs.nyu.edu> writes:

Robert> even for the environment that Sarah is talking about. I
Robert> believe the 20% figure if you are talking about the difficulty
Robert> that people have in reading upper case if they are used to
Robert> reading normal lower case, but I bet if you tool a control
Robert> group of children and reversed the way they were taught that
Robert> you would see the 20% in the opposite direction.

Interestingly: this isn't necessarily true.  As the jargon file
mentions:

   Decades ago, back in the days when it was the sole supplier of
   long-distance hardcopy transmittal devices, the Teletype
   Corporation was faced with a major design choice.  To shorten code
   lengths and cut complexity in the printing mechanism, it had been
   decided that teletypes would use a monocase font, either ALL UPPER
   or all lower.  The Question Of The Day was therefore, which one to
   choose.  A study was conducted on readability under various
   conditions of bad ribbon, worn print hammers, etc.  Lowercase won;
   it is less dense and has more distinctive letterforms, and is thus
   much easier to read both under ideal conditions and when the
   letters are mangled or partly obscured.

While deformation isn't as important these days, the density and
distinctiveness of lower case characters continue to be important.
Incidentally, the chairman killed the proposal for theological
reasons.

Also: while this is hardly scientific, I was taught upper case first.
Reading text with large amounts of upper case continues to be a pain
in the ass, with one exception; I can read small capitals in small
quantities quite passably.

Robert> One of the advantages in C, is that there was a uniform style
Robert> in C (I never saw anyone for instance using all upper case
Robert> identifiers in C for all purposes, though of course this is
Robert> perfectly legal in C).

Partly this was because C doesn't have real symbolic constants,
instead using a preprocessor.  Using all upper case for preprocessor
constants alerts the reader that something magic is going on, and
diminishes the possibility of the preprocessor stomping all over your
program text.
- -- 
Graham Hughes    http://A-abe.resnet.ucsb.edu/~graham/     MIME & PGP mail OK.
const int PGP_fingerprint = "E9 B7 5F A0 F8 88 9E 1E  7C 62 D9 88 E1 03 29 5B";
   #include <stddisclaim.h>

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