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From: sb463ba@l1-hrz.uni-duisburg.de (Georg Bauhaus)
Newsgroups: 
 comp.lang.ruby,comp.lang.ada,comp.lang.awk,comp.lang.clarion,comp.lang.java.programmer,comp.lang.pl1,comp.lang.vrml
Subject: Re: Long names are doom ?
Followup-To: 
 comp.lang.ruby,comp.lang.ada,comp.lang.awk,comp.lang.clarion,comp.lang.java.programmer,comp.lang.pl1,comp.lang.vrml
Date: Tue, 5 Jun 2001 11:52:22 +0000 (UTC)
Organization: Gerhard-Mercator-Universitaet - Gesamthochschule Duisburg
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Date: 2001-06-05T11:52:22+00:00
List-Id: <comp.lang.ada>

Jon Skeet (skeet@pobox.com) wrote:
: Wes Groleau <wwgrol@ftw.rsc.raytheon.com> wrote:

: The worst situation is when someone doesn't follow a convention *at 
: all*, changing capitalisation etc at a whim - at that stage, you have to 
: look up method names etc every time you want to use them.

: > Any convention, enforced or not, for encoding information that is not
: > important is increasing the chance of being distracted from what IS
: > important.

: So you believe that

: package TeST;class SHowArGS{public static void main (String[]ARgS){for
: (int SOMeThINg=0;SOMeThINg<ARgs.length;SOMeThINg++)System.out.println
: (ARgS[SOMeThINg]);}}

: is *more* likely to create distraction than:

What is important is not just syntax and letter case. E.g.,
I've had no difficulties in reading and understanding your
example in the form above, left to right as in books.
(After all, letter case is an invention that came relatively
late in the use of latin alphabets, sometime after carolingean
minuscules in the 9c, I believe. (Side note: Serif Courier is very different
from sans serif Windoze Fixedsys, so whether it is easy
to distinguish characters in Marin's ll11l1 depends on the font...))

There is a distinction to be made between reading and inspecting.
There is    no    use   in    using a     tabular
layout      when  it    is    not   useful      as
it    does  not   at    all   help  readers,
but it is useful when you are inspecting interface definitions, say.


: package test;

: class ShowArguments
: {
:     public static void main (String [] args)
:     {
:         for (int i=0; i < args.length; i++)
:             System.out.println (args[i]);
:     }
: }


(Due to a local convention that what
carries meaning in a function declaration is return type,
name, and arguments, to a larger extent than modifiers,
I was distracted by the leading modifier "clutter", and
by the same convention,  where are those helpful brackets
around the non-block statement? Ah, those correct width
stripes on ties arguments ... :-)

By the way, if you like being shocked, have a look at tex.web,
the file that has the sources for TeX in it. Still not an
unmaintainable program, which leads me to the conclusion that
the programmer's responsability is to write source code that
can be understood by others, _possibly with the help of
tools(used by them)_ to make sources fit the most productive taste.

Seems difficult to arrive at this idea, given that HTML has
first brought us absurdities like font-tags, instead of style
sheets. :-)


Georg Bauhaus
---
Microsoft Windows--a whole new perspective on information hiding!