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: 103376,411186037d1bc912 X-Google-Attributes: gid103376,public From: bobduff@world.std.com (Robert A Duff) Subject: Re: Some questions about Ada. Date: 1996/05/04 Message-ID: #1/1 X-Deja-AN: 152967331 references: <4me37a$ipl@krusty.irvine.com> organization: The World Public Access UNIX, Brookline, MA newsgroups: comp.lang.ada Date: 1996-05-04T00:00:00+00:00 List-Id: In article , Robert Dewar wrote: >I see it! I think it is terrible Ada style to be inconsistent in casing >keywords or identifiers. In fact I think it is nice if the compiler has >an option to prevent such sloppiness (when we compile in internal GNAT >mode, consistent casing is enforced). i agree. it's not a matter of really misundERSTanding things, assuming you know the rules. it's just that doing things in an unconventional or Sloppy way makes the code harder to reAD. By the way, does the gnat switch disallow declaring two overloaded things called, say, NonEval and NoneVal? I assume that it merely requires that each reference to one or the other is capitalized like its declaration. >However, I think that having case sensitivity in languages is a very >bad idea. For one thing it makes it very difficult to talk verbally about >programs, and if people really start defining identifiers like >Time_of_Day and Time_OF_Day to mean different things, then it damages >readability badly. I think it's already nearly impossible to express programs by talking, so I don't find that argument interesting. Whenever I'm sitting in a design session, and somebody says a piece of a program out loud, it is nearly always necessary to write it on the blackboard for people to understand. By the way, mathematicians use case sensitivity -- e.g., "Let X be the set of all x such that x has so-and-so property." How do mathemeticians do that over the phone? I suspect the answer is, they don't bother trying. - Bob