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: 103376,2afac1a4161c7f35 X-Google-Attributes: gid103376,public From: Brian Rogoff Subject: Re: Distinguishing type names from other identifiers Date: 1998/01/25 Message-ID: #1/1 X-Deja-AN: 319224739 References: <6agcg1$i1k@lotho.delphi.com> Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII X-Trace: 885771628 25469 bpr 206.184.139.132 Mime-Version: 1.0 Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada Date: 1998-01-25T00:00:00+00:00 List-Id: On 25 Jan 1998 tmoran@bix.com wrote: > It's somewhat odd, actually, that most computer languages use only word > order (counting punctuation symbols as words) for parsing and don't > use spelling/prefix/suffix changes to the words themselves as grammatical > indicators. I wonder if that will still be the case in 50 years? (Early) Fortran is one. The Scheme community uses a convention of "!" as a suffix for side-effecting functions, and "?" for queries. Some other Lisps adopt a convention to distinguish types. OCaml also has some capitalization rules for various entities. I think that not enforcing a convention is OK, but I doubt we'll ever achieve community wide consensus on this issue. Just be glad that the capitalization rule of underscore separated intercap seems to be widely followed. There will probably be about half a dozen styles for dealing with the typename issue. -- Brian