Re: Games? A Newbie question

[Ted Dennison<dennison@telepath.com>]

In article <3C3AB947.971E14AB@icn.siemens.de>, Alfred Hilscher says...
>So maybe this is a reason: Many pepole know the island Java so they know
>that "Java" is a name. But the name "Ada" is not very common (at least

I suppose that's possible. There's a city named Ada around here, and it used to
be a common woman's name, but that was many years ago.

>If the language would have been called "Augusta" the I think nobody
>would write AUGUSTA.

That's quite possible.


>Ted Dennison wrote:
>> Secondly, I tested that theory a couple of years ago when I worked with a 
..
>> I have a couple of the latter myself. Not *one* of them capitalized Ada that


>I've look to my bookshelf and many of my early book wrote it that way.
>And my first reference manual is titled "ADA REFERENCE  ANS-MIL-STD
>1815A".

Fair enough, but when *everything* is capitalized I don't think its a very good
example. No one would look at this and thing "reference" is spelled "REFERENCE".

>I took a look on Amazon and found:

This is actually a stellar example of the principle. You show some examples
where it is capitalized *correctly* on the book, but incorrectly in Amazon's
title. In their defense, they got it correct it quite a few places as well,
including the one where the book cover artists got it wrong.

>http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0471012769/qid=1010480247/br=1-4/ref=br_lf_b_4/002-9221151-1373622
>http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0309055970/qid=1010480366/br=1-18/ref=br_lf_b_18/002-9221151-1373622
>http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0132049678/qid=1010480552/br=1-20/ref=br_lf_b_20/002-9221151-1373622

Further examples where other words that are clearly not acronyms are also all
caps. I can't take these as examples becuase its clear in each case from context
that everything is being capitalized.

>http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0130040789/qid=1010480464/br=1-8/ref=br_lf_b_8/002-9221151-1373622

Wow. This indeed is an actual example where they got the name wrong. I've never
heard of or seen this book before, but it apparently does exist. Interestingly,
Amazon got it right in their rendition of the book's title. :-)

>http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/085312535X/qid=1010479521/sr=1-124/ref=sr_1_66_125/002-9221151-1373622
>http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0130459496/qid=1010479713/sr=1-186/ref=sr_1_2_187/002-9221151-1373622
>http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0201137925/qid=1010479713/sr=1-199/ref=sr_1_2_200/002-9221151-1373622
>http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0387126953/qid=1010479897/sr=1-241/ref=sr_1_2_242/002-9221151-1373622
>http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/9992080418//ref=sr_1_0_376/002-9221151-1373622

The cover on these is not shown. Its possible that they spelled it wrong in the
book, but I'm inclined to give them the benifit of the doubt and assume that
Amazon just got it wrong. The Barnes book I *know* doesn't have it wrong,
because its in "the library". This is most likely just several more examples of
people who don't know the language capitalizing it "ADA" for no apparent reason.


>And book with "ada" instead "Ada":
>http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0201403633/qid=1010480247/br=1-8/ref=br_lf_b_8/002-9221151-1373622
>http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0132303507/qid=1010480366/br=1-6/ref=br_lf_b_6/002-9221151-1373622 

I'd mentioned one of those already. The other actually does not use "ada". If
you look a bit more carefully, the first "a" is significantly larger than the
second. Their font just makes capitals look similar to the lower-case letters.

If book covers were a deciding factor for anyone, we'd expect to see a few folks
come in here mislead by the English book asking about "ada". That doesn't
happen. 

Outside of one exception, which to my mind is counterbalanced by the one
lower-case exception, no book actually uses "ADA". Yet you found several
examples where Amamzon insisted on "ADA" anyway. I think its clear that book
covers cannot be blamed.

---
T.E.D.    homepage   - http://www.telepath.com/dennison/Ted/TED.html

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