Re: Looking for good Ada95 book

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

Lars says

"The argument is "egoless programming". If there is no ego involved
wouldn't one then be willing to, not only write, but also read other
styles than ones own?"

No, that's not right, it's not a matter of ego that makes it difficult
to both read and write multiple styles. You get used to one particular
style, and as a result it is both easier to read and write once you are
used to it. Maybe some programmers can read multiple styles completely
independently, but I never met anyone who claimed this ability.

In fact the typical thing is that people find it MUCH easier to read the
style they are used to, just as they are most at home listening to the dialect
of English they are most used to. 

And the resulting conclsuion is that it is desirable if everyone gets used
to the same style. You can get used to almost any style, so it is desirable
if everyone goes through the excercise of learning one style well for the
same style.

Mike thinks I am making a big deal out of it. Not surprising, he obviously
does not feel that consistency is important here, and thinks it is trivially
easy for people to change. OK, but I strongly disagree. I have seem too many
people adamantly hold on to the style they first learned and refuse to change.

And Mike, it is not that I am not reading the content of the book, which I
think highly of, but other things being equal I would choose a book using
standard style. One encouraging point is that now I have a number of Ada CS1
books to look at, and generally they are adopting the "standard" Ada style
of lower case keywords and Mixed_Case_Identifiers.

And no Mike, my students do not seem to need upper case keywords to know
what is a keyword and what is not. Furthermore I do not believe that there
has ever been a study showing the supposed pedagogical advantage of upper
case keywords. Historically, the reason this style is common in the Pascal
world is that it is a remnant of the notion of stropping in Algol. In Algol
and Algol60, keywords are in boldface, and a way has to be found to indicate
this. A common choice was to use upper case to represent bold, and that
common style in Algol-60 was imported into the Pascal world.

Mike, I know you think I am making a big deal out of a very small point, but
that IS the point, I do NOT think that consistency in style across the
Ada community is a small point at all, and I am not alone in this thinking.
I well remember a Tri-Ada at which one of the plenary speakers said that one
of his major objections to Ada was the habit of using upper case identifiers,
and there was *huge* applause. Now of course we are not talking about
UPPER_CASE_IDENTIFIERS here but just upper case BEGIN END etc, but I think
you will find a lot of Ada programmers find this upper case keyword style
highly distatesful. 

Others don't think it matters much.

What is a little unusual about Mike's position is that he thinks it is
a small point, but is still adamant in insisting on using this nonstandard
style in his books. Mike, you are allowed to be insistent on your position,
but if you are insistent, then surely it is NOT such a small point :-)