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: 103376,768ec7d79291ed2c X-Google-Attributes: gid103376,public From: dewar@merv.cs.nyu.edu (Robert Dewar) Subject: Re: IDENTIFIERS in Upper Case Date: 1997/03/28 Message-ID: #1/1 X-Deja-AN: 229202754 References: <1997Mar26.185431.12742@nosc.mil> <333AB9A0.7284@grammatech.com> Organization: New York University Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada Date: 1997-03-28T00:00:00+00:00 List-Id: iMatthew quotes <> I believe that this observation is totally irrelevant to programming languages. Furthermore, I am not sure it is true even for the environment that Sarah is talking about. I believe the 20% figure if you are talking about the difficulty that people have in reading upper case if they are used to reading normal lower case, but I bet if you tool a control group of children and reversed the way they were taught that you would see the 20% in the opposite direction. In the case of programming languages, we ARE talking about people who are very much used to whatever style they are reading. My guess is that if you use only people who are very used to reading the style that they are presented with, you will not see measurable differences. The trouble is in getting really comparable groups. When I first started to read Ada code written in mixed-case I found it MUCH harder to read than the all-upper-case identifier code that I was used to (at the time I wrote most of my Ada code for Alsys, and that was our internal convention at the time). However, now it is exactly the opposite way round for me. That's why I think it is important that everyone learn to be comfortable with the same style. The particular choice of style is pretty unimportant. There are very few objective arguments that favor one style over another, for a discussion of these see our previous CLA thread on the the subject, but I think these points are minor compared to the annoyances tha result from people trying to interact who have different styles. One of the advantages in C, is that there was a uniform style in C (I never saw anyone for instance using all upper case identifiers in C for all purposes, though of course this is perfectly legal in C). In the Ada 95 world, the use of mixed case identifiers and lower case keywords is almost universal (I am making that judgment from the code we have received from thousands of Ada programmers who have sent us code samples). Yes there are a few variations (probably the majority come from students influenced by Mike Feldman's "non-standard style" -- that certainly accounts for at least 50% of the variations -- some of the rest are old Ada 83 programs written under influence of the implied recomendations of the old RM (all upper case identifiers). Since we nearly have a standard in effect, I think the best choice is to follow that standard and use lower case keywords and mixed case identifiers. This is one situation where, like driving on one side of the road, it is more important to have consistency in the community than to make any one particular choice. Yes, it can be painful to change over, it certainly was for me, it took quite a while before I could read mixed case stuff as reliably as the all upper case identifier style I was used to, but the change over is worth while (just as Sweden found it was worth while changing to driving on the right :-)