Re: IDENTIFIERS in Upper Case

[bobduff@world.std.com (Robert A Duff)]

In article <333BF206.59E2@lanl.gov>,
William Clodius  <wclodius@lanl.gov> wrote:
>...However, I suspect most readers of this
>group are not interested in most applications, but are rather interested
>in the display of text on monitors for a few selected applications,
>e.g., email, and editing code.

I'm interested in the display of source code, both on the screen, and
printed on paper.  Most people don't use variable-width fonts for source
code, and there's not much tool support for it, as far as I know, which
seems odd to me.  Especially given that variable-width fonts printed in
nice serif fonts is pretty common for documentation and such.

I've seen browsers/editors that put all comments in italics, which seems
very bad to me.

>... Serif looses its advantages as resolution
>decreases, so sans-serif tends to be preferred for display on monitors,
>however some serifs can work well on monitors. Similarly, for the
>applications that I suspect are of greatest interest to this group
>monospaced fonts work better than proportional fonts. Simple automated
>pretty printing almost requires a monospaced font.

Well, certainly "simple" pretty-printing requires a monospaced font, but
why do we insist on such simplicity, when we're willing to put up with
huge amounts of complexity (e.g. LaTeX) in natural-language written
material, to make it look nice?  I mean, why do we argue endlessly about
whether to indent by "3 spaces" or "4 spaces", when we could argue about
whether to indent by ".25 inch" or whatever?

Probably the answer is that fixed-width plain ascii text is much more
portable than anything else.

- Bob