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,b2f46302cf6a9a2f X-Google-Attributes: gid103376,public From: dewar@merv.cs.nyu.edu (Robert Dewar) Subject: Re: Using ARRAYS for grade reporting? Date: 1998/04/19 Message-ID: #1/1 X-Deja-AN: 345814566 References: <6hdfoc$h6i@lotho.delphi.com> X-Complaints-To: usenet@news.nyu.edu X-Trace: news.nyu.edu 893039749 4709 (None) 128.122.140.58 Organization: New York University Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada Date: 1998-04-19T00:00:00+00:00 List-Id: tmoran says <(remembe that the use of String here is just plain wrong :-)) This is a fact about the Ada language and Ada compilers. >But another point is that the use of plurals for the field names is >styulistically incorrect. The field names should be Name and Grade This is an opinion of the author (which I share), not a fact. Unless of course somebody has actually done research conclusively demonstrating that using plural field names substantially increases the error rate, or does something else bad, to programs. >> That's why I sent two separate messages, the first a tecnical note on the use of String. The second was clearly labeled as being *stylistically* incorrect. Matters of style are definitely less objective. However, I would not be willing to say they are mere matters of opinion. This particular case is a rather clear one. The use of the word Grades to refer to a single grade is definitely a bad idea. There are attempts in the field of "software physics", to objectively measure the effect of such stylistic choices, but it is not clear that the rather soft statistics that come from such studies can conculsively demonstrate anything. It is very hard to eliminate all other variables from such measurements. But in my opinion, it would be a big mistake to take the attitude that stylistic points should be ignored unless backed up by such supposed "evidence". You will often find broad agreement on stylistic issues based on experience, and it would be a mistake to ignore such experience (after all Tom Moran notes that he agrees with the point I made, and I expect that most experienced Ada programmers would agree with us. It is certainly not easy to always obtain agreement (dig up the recent thread on type names for an example of this), but there are broad consensus positions that are worth recognizing, even in the absence of "conclusive" evidence. Certainly a position on an issue of style is not a fact! That's the meaning of the word style in connection with programming languages. It refers to rules of programming that are NOT mandated by the language!