Subject:
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Re: What are all those lego companies?
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Newsgroups:
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lugnet.robotics
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Date:
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Fri, 16 Feb 2001 18:06:03 GMT
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Original-From:
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Chris 'Xenon' Hanson <XENON@3avoidspamDNATURE.COM>
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Reply-To:
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xenon@3dnature.com#NoMoreSpam#
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Viewed:
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608 times
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Steve Baker wrote:
When you need to bash in a ton of text, cutting down on the typing *does* help a little...
but it's certainly not a major consideration. I can't come up with any other explanation
for the MixedCaseButNoUnderscores style...people are certainly using that style more and
more - if you have a better explanation as to why they do that, let's hear it!
Not to add fire to a code style holy war, but anyone programming in a
C-like language would do well to check out modern editors like Emacs or
the MS Visual C++ 6 editor which will do word completion for you. I
forget the Emacs keystroke to invoke it (and it's customizable, so I'm
sure it's different in different places.. [;)] , in Visual 6 it's CTRL-SPACE.
What it does is look at the partially-completed word you've typed and
attempt to guess from candidate words used elsewhere in the document,
what word you were typing. If it can unambiguously determine the word, it
will complete it for you.
This is great for increasing code typing speed and correctness when you
have to deal with difficult to type API symbols like
lpfnODBCFrangleFringetoHPRTExt32()
or the equally evil
do_some_nefariously_verbose_thing_on_unix()
I think I can also lay to rest why the underscore has lost ground in
favor of the MixedCaseSymbolName.
Most programmers I know are (grudging) touch typists. I am, unconsciously.
I took a touch-typing class in 7th grade, and promptly forgot every bit of
it. But after 20-odd years of coding, my neurons have wired themselves up
to where I no longer think about keys on the keyboard any more than I think
about syllables and tongue motion when I speak.
If you look at the position of underscore on the keyboard, it's a long
reach from the home row and induces a certain amount of latency in the
character stream when typing it. Therefore, it's a hindrance to fast
keyboarding. Ergo, it must be eliminated. Simply capitalizing is a fast
and common keyboard operation, so it is favorable.
Also, my understanding of how the human mind visually parses written
text suggests that we're better at picking up positive-space delimiters
(the larger/taller capital letters) than we are at picking up
negative-space markers (the gaps introduced by spaces or underscores) and
therefore CapitalizedSymbols may be easier (for some of us anyway) to
read quickly.
Enough rambling,
Chris - Xenon
--
Chris Hanson | Xenon@3DNature.com | I've got friends in low latitudes!
New WCS 5 Demo Version! http://www.3DNature.com/demo/
"There is no Truth. There is only Perception. To Perceive is to Exist." - Xen
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Message is in Reply To:
 | | Re: What are all those lego companies?
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| (...) Yes - that's true - but currently, I can't think of a single language that does that, so as a practical answer to the original (and very valid) question, this is an irrelevent comment. (...) Woaahh. What I *said* is absolutely true. You may (...) (24 years ago, 16-Feb-01, to lugnet.robotics)
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