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From: Kilgallen@eisner.decus.org.nospam (Larry Kilgallen)
Newsgroups: 
 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 ?
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Date: 2001-06-04T19:40:29-05:00
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In article <pb2ohtgs64jhssmmohpq5qr7nmcsq6119c@4ax.com>, Roedy Green <roedy@mindprod.com> writes:
> On Mon, 4 Jun 2001 11:46:36 -0400, "Marin David Condic"
> <marin.condic.auntie.spam@pacemicro.com> wrote or quoted :
> 
>> Hence the reason Ada was
>>designed with readability in mind rather than attempting to save keystrokes.
> 
> There is a general rule though, that a terser program makes it easier

And where is this rule written ?  Most programs I have seen can be made
more clear by tripling their length with well-written comments (once
good identifier names have been chosen).

> to see the big picture.  You can get more of it on screen at once.
> Use of smaller methods so can easily see the whole flow of a method in
> a single screen full, without getting bogged in too much detail,
> really helps.

Subprograms are important to separate logical functions, but using
them just in pursuit of getting the whole thing to show on a screen
of some arbitrary size is much less valuable.

> What I find so strange is something as simple as variable
> sized/coloured {} and () to make visual balancing easier still has not
> caught on.  

What makes you say it has not caught on ?

Several editors do syntax coloring for Ada, and the Alpha editor also
does it for C, C++, Fortran, HTML, Java, Pascal, Modula-2, Perl,
Postscript, Scheme, SQL, Tcl, TeX, LaTeX and LaTeX2e.

BBEdit does it for HTML JavaScript, Perl, PHP3, XHTML and XML.

Of those two, BBEdit is more popular, but someone else would have to
speak to the capabilities of various Emacs implementations.