Re: Language Choice and Coding style

[dewar@cs.nyu.edu (Robert Dewar)]

James said

"  Except for the "Hungarian notation" silliness, the idea of
spellingVariableNamesLikeThis was originally a Smalltalk and/or Pascal
idiom, and it has become nearly universal in GUI libraries (again I
think because of Smalltalk's influence).  C programmers use variable names


I really think this is Pascal influence rather than Smalltalk influence,
since it predates the Smalltalk craze. Remember that Pascal had an
out-of-proportion influence on PC's because of Turbo-Pascal. The Microsoft
interfaces, on which many C programmers grow up, are Pascal derived (they
even used Pascal calling sequences, and needed special treatment from C
to get the calling sequence right). As I said in an earlier message, I
trace the StyleOfSmashingWordsTogetherWhichIDoNotLike to UCSD Pascal.

P.S. When using the default file names in GNAT, this style really is
unpleasant, since the default file names are all lower case (thankyou
Unix for being so particular about casing of file names :-) and you
get a file name like styleofsmasgingwordstogetherwhichidonotlike.ads
which is really charming :-) [of course you can always use the
Source_File_Name pragma to specify a non-default file name]

In an earlier note, someone (perhaps tongue in cheek) suggested that
the reason that this style is popular is that programmers are too lazy
to press the shift key and reach for the underline. It's hard to believe
that coding styles could be significantly affected by such silliness
but who knows?