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From: pattis@cs.washington.edu (Richard Pattis)
Subject: Re: Looking for good Ada95 book
Date: 1996/11/18
Message-ID: <E12rqM.1Io@beaver.cs.washington.edu>#1/1
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references: <32723F6A.54A3@dtek.chalmers.se> <dewar.847671101@merv>
 <56b275$6k4@felix.seas.gwu.edu> <dewar.848228846@merv>
organization: Computer Science & Engineering, U of Washington, Seattle
newsgroups: comp.lang.ada
summary: Boldefface: An oxymoronic approach to Reserved Words in Ada
Date: 1996-11-18T00:00:00+00:00
List-Id: <comp.lang.ada>


Since this discussion is still ongoing (and civil), I'd like to support Mike's
position on capitalized reserved words with the following observations, as
a long time CS1 instructor. I'll try to be short and non-redundant; but I
have read only most, not all the messages on this topic.

1) On the Ada Standard for reserved words (my LRM has been in moving boxes
for 4 months and won't be available for another 3): If I remember correctly,
the reserved words are not only lower case, but appear in bold face. Thus, the
intent is that they stand out. If most Ada IDEs (used by CS1 students) support
a bold face convention (both in the editor and when printing source files)
then I'd say to use that style; but if not (I haven't written Ada for 2 years,
so I'm not up on the technology), all caps is a good way to make reserved
words stand out.

2) And, reserved words do need to stand out in CS1. Much of the course
concerns learning the meanings of these words, which also act as roadmaps
to beginners for understanding code - because much of CS1 concerns algorithms
embodied in (nested) control structures. As students progress, abstractions
start to play a larger role, and the importance of reserved words diminishes,
and so can their prominence.

3) Final comment to all CS1 instructors: show these discussions to your
students. Personally, I'm less interested in the outcome of the discussion
(who wins) than seeing Ada luminaries (and passionate ones at that) marshaling
their mental powers to debate issues of style, and increase our awareness of
the importance of writing readable code.

  I frequently tell students that for individual projects, I don't care what
style they use, so long as it is consistent and can be defended - and I do
ask them to defend theirs and criticize mine when the styles diverge. Again,
I am less interested in who is "right" and more interested in whether the
students can present a well reasoned argument about the appropriatensess of
the style they selected. That skill is more important than learning the
"right" style in CS1.


Rich

PS: I'm now in Pittsburgh (although I still read newsgroups at UW, where I
happened to see this post) where my e-mail account is pattis@cs.cmu.edu