Re: Warning: Religious naming convention discussion :-) [was: assign help!!]

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

In article <dewar.863717431@merv>, Robert Dewar <dewar@merv.cs.nyu.edu> wrote:
>This proposal was unanimously accepted at the DR/WG9 meeting the South of
>England in the forest (I forgot the name :-)

My memory is *slightly* different: There were three separate votes taken
(which I thought was silly), on three separate issues.  Whether to allow
(1) leading underscores, (2) two underscores in a row, or (3) trailing
underscores.  To my astonishment, the votes came out different.  I'm not
too sure, but I think (2) lost by a little bit, (1) lost by a greater
margin, and (3) won by a little bit.  So the design team published the
next version of the document allowing (3).  However, this annoyed some
people greatly.  It was more than just the French delegation.  So,
although I had been in favor of free use of underscores, I pushed on
Tucker to go back to the Ada 83 rule, because (A) I thought that it was
ludicrous to change the rule, but not change it fully, and (B) although
the split was roughly 50-50, the people against trailing underscores
felt much more strongly (fanatically, I would say!) than the other side,
so we shouldn't piss people off over such an unimportant feature.  So we
proposed this at the next meeting, and that's the way it ended up.

I can't remember the name of the forest, either.  :-)

>Anyway, there you are -- it's not in Ada 95 (you can guess which side
>Robert_ Dewar_ was_ supporting_ :-)

I was on the same side as Robert.  The really annoying thing is that we
were trying to have a good interface to C, and *leading* underscores
would come in really handy, there.

I suppose the design team could have insisted on having our way, but we
wanted to save our insisting for cases we felt were important enough to
go against the majority opinion.

- Bob