Re: Ada's identifiers casing considered ugly

["Randy Brukardt" <randy@rrsoftware.com>]

"Nasser M. Abbasi" <nma@12000.org> wrote in message 
news:k28mt2$jnj$1@speranza.aioe.org...
...
> "I like underscore in names of variables. But I do not like
> at all the current Ada tradition of using Upper case for
> first letter as in
>
>        This_Is_An_Identifier
>
> I find this ugly and hard on the eye to read.

I agree with this.

> ... I like
> all lower case for variable names, as it is easier to read. Less
> variation in texture and form
>
> this_is_an_identifier"

But I don't agree with this. This blends identifiers and reserved words into 
an unreadable mess. (Maybe it's OK if you ONLY use colorizing editors and 
never expect anyone else to use your code.)

RRS uses "title case" for identifiers, which means that we use the same 
casing as you would if you wrote this as the title of something. For the 
above, that gives:

   This_is_an_Identifier

Our pretty printer can enforce this style directly (it has a list of words 
that aren't capitalized).

I've also experimented with capitalizing just the first letter:

   This_is_an_identifier

I definitely agree that capitalizing words like "Is" is ugly. I get in 
trouble repeatedly working on the Ada Standard, because I naturally refuse 
to type "_Is_" and thus a lot of identifiers end up in the "wrong" case.

                                          Randy.