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From: Robert A Duff <bobduff@shell01.TheWorld.com>
Subject: Re: ada paper critic
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Date: Sun, 16 Jun 2002 23:02:54 GMT
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Date: 2002-06-16T23:02:54+00:00
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Ted Dennison <dennison@telepath.com> writes:

> Robert A Duff wrote:
> > ALL_CAPS *was* the recommended style for Ada 83.
> > So it doesn't go back to punch cards and the like.
> 
> By whom?

The Ada 83 Reference Manual recommended all caps for identifiers,
and lower case for reserved words.  The fact that *something* was
supposed to be in lower case indicates that they weren't concerned about
devices incapable of doing lower case.

>... We never used all caps on any of the 4 large Ada 83 projects I 
> worked on.

Neither did I.  All caps is so ugly that a lot of people ignored the RM
advice.  However, I was a consultant at Alsys (Jean Ichbiah's company)
for a while, and they used ALL_CAPS identifiers as recommended by the
Standard, so of course I conformed to that style while there.

I believe I've read studies that show mixed case and lower case to be
more readable than all caps.  The reason, they speculated, is that the
shape of a word in all caps is a simple rectangle, whereas the shape of
a word in lower case has ascenders and descenders that help one
recognize the word by its shape.  I can't give a cite (sorry) -- this
was many years ago.

>... Since the first one was the first project anyone there had 
> ever done in Ada, and mixed case was in the project standard, I have to 
> think we got it from somewhere else.

- Bob