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 autolearn=no autolearn_force=no version=3.4.4 X-Google-Language: ENGLISH,ASCII-7-bit X-Google-Thread: 103376,768ec7d79291ed2c X-Google-Attributes: gid103376,public From: "Graham C. Hughes" Subject: Re: IDENTIFIERS in Upper Case Date: 1997/04/09 Message-ID: <87k9mbizye.fsf@A-abe.resnet.ucsb.edu>#1/1 X-Deja-AN: 231986894 Sender: graham@A-abe.resnet.ucsb.edu References: <1997Mar26.185431.12742@nosc.mil> <333AB9A0.7284@grammatech.com> Organization: University of California, Santa Barbara Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada Date: 1997-04-09T00:00:00+00:00 List-Id: -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- >>>>> "Robert" == Robert Dewar 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 -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: 2.6.3 Charset: noconv Comment: Processed by Mailcrypt 3.4, an Emacs/PGP interface iQCVAwUBM0wacSqNPSINiVE5AQH9YwQAjTkd6AfOcFfagKEoATEJ4dFO8uS6Yprm 5m+T0EPR2QrE0SuYZrWMYZ+Kn3N27LO7kx+ZquFe0IjqwJnj0yIImZwcX4dXQ3Jv kmnnFRcQGHbilQ+woRiVnwGfsZBNi9yTDJN8DROYW5OZkYEhuJBR7W6Ho5g5OHCA u5Io1ilysWQ= =r5VQ -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----