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From: kcline17@hotmail.com (Kevin Cline)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada
Subject: Re: ada paper critic
Date: 17 Jun 2002 00:07:45 -0700
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Robert A Duff <bobduff@shell01.TheWorld.com> wrote in message news:<wccn0turfmp.fsf@shell01.TheWorld.com>...
> Ted Dennison <dennison@telepath.com> writes:
> 
> > Robert A Duff wrote:
> > > ALL_CAPS *was* the recommended style for Ada 83.
> > > So it doesn't go back to punch cards and the like.
> > 
> > By whom?
> 
> The Ada 83 Reference Manual recommended all caps for identifiers,
> and lower case for reserved words.  The fact that *something* was
> supposed to be in lower case indicates that they weren't concerned about
> devices incapable of doing lower case.
> 
> >... We never used all caps on any of the 4 large Ada 83 projects I 
> > worked on.
> 
> Neither did I.  All caps is so ugly that a lot of people ignored the RM
> advice.  However, I was a consultant at Alsys (Jean Ichbiah's company)
> for a while, and they used ALL_CAPS identifiers as recommended by the
> Standard, so of course I conformed to that style while there.
> 
> I believe I've read studies that show mixed case and lower case to be
> more readable than all caps.  The reason, they speculated, is that the
> shape of a word in all caps is a simple rectangle, whereas the shape of
> a word in lower case has ascenders and descenders that help one
> recognize the word by its shape.  I can't give a cite (sorry) -- this
> was many years ago.

I don't need a study to tell me that.  ALL I NEED IS A SHORT TEXT SAMPLE
LIKE THIS ONE AND IT BECOMES QUITE OBVIOUS that mixed case is much easier
to read.