Re: Looking for good Ada95 book

[mheaney@ni.net (Matthew Heaney)]

In article <dewar.846952540@merv>, dewar@merv.cs.nyu.edu (Robert Dewar) wrote:

>Mike said
>
>'Your characterization of the books is correct, Robert, though I think
>it's going too far to describe the lexical style as "horrible." It
>does what it is intended to do.
>"
>
>No, I stick by my characterization of horrible. It means that you are
>teaching students to use a style which is not the standard style that
>we want to encourage for Ada use. People tend to stick with the style
>they first learn, so this kind of nonstandard choice causes problems
>later on.

Mike, I agree with Robert here.

One thing that Robert didn't mention is that many language-sensitive
editors put the language keywords in a different color.  So that should
obviate the need for you to do anything special in the code (ie make all
uppercase) to call out keywords.

The other thing, too, is that studies have shown (see Ben Schneiderman's
book, Designing the User Interface) that humans read all-uppercase more
slowly than mixed case.  

And these days with "netiquette idioms" having emerged, all uppercase means
SHOUTING AT THE READER.  You don't want to shout at the poor reader of your
Ada source code, do you?

--------------------------------------------------------------------
Matthew Heaney
Software Development Consultant
mheaney@ni.net
(818) 985-1271