Re: non key-words in xemacs to be upper case

[rogoff@sccm.Stanford.EDU (Brian Rogoff)]

dewar@cs.nyu.edu (Robert Dewar) writes:
   In my experience anyone can get used to almost any convention. What is
   valuable is for everyone to use the same convention, so that silly
   disagreements on capitalization conventions do not get in the way of
   code sharing etc.

   It seems clear that the Ada community largely prefers lower case keywords
   and mixed case identifiers. I think it is a good idea if the minority
   that likes other conventions makes an effort to shift.

I completely agree with this, the AQAS style guidelines seem pretty good to 
me. I was using the Smalltalk/ObjC/Java naming style before, and I switched 
over easily. I made the switch because I use Norman Cohen's book as my main 
Ada reference and I wanted my conventions to reflect the (Ada programming 
community) majority choice. 

I'd like to add that I think that there may be more to this matter than 
simply following the whims of the majority to make ease code sharing, which 
would be a great reason regardless. There is a large amount of accumulated 
wisdom in graphic design, particularly typography, which could be applied 
here. There are probably more than a few people on this newsgroup who can 
recall reading a math text which looks like it was typeset on a typewriter 
(e.g.  Keisler's "Foundations of Infinitesimal Calculus"). It looked like 
crap, no matter how good the content was. So type (the other kind of type ;-)
choice matters, when it comes to readability.

When I look through some of the Ada texts on the bookshelves, the ones whose 
typesetting I find most appealing are the ones which adhere to AQAS naming 
style and use boldface, rather than caps, to set off reserved identifiers.
This is much nicer to read than using single weight and all caps. This seems 
to be the style that quite a few Ada 95 book authors have adopted. It is also 
my choice for reading Ada code. I saw one book that used bold lower case for 
reserved words and all caps for variables and functions, I think, and I 
recall that I still didn't like the all caps, but that using boldface helped 
a bit. I notice that the Cohen and Barnes seem to prefer san-serif fonts for 
code. I am not convinced that this is best. Any informed opininons? What 
about other books?

-- Brian