I think this is a simple readability and/or standards issue. For
example, the APA publication manual specifically separates the label
from the bracket in reporting statistics and degrees of freedom, for
example for an analysis of variance it is "F (2, 24)" not "F(2, 24)".
However, although intuitively it seems that spaces increase
readability, I believe that the research on reading suggests that
eliminating spaces betweenwordsasinthisline does not significantly
decrease speed. I am not quite sure where I picked up this
counterintuitive factoid, but it might have been cited in:
Rayner, K. (1998). Eye movements in reading and information
processing: 20 years of research. Psychological Bulletin, 124(3),
372-422.
Anyone else?
At 09:12 +0100 2001-09-21, Chris Douce wrote:
>About a year ago I was embroiled in an increasingly heated debate
>about bracketing, namely where to place a bracket after a keyword.
>In one case, a bracket was placed immediately after a keyword, i.e:
>
> if(foo == bar)
>
>in another case, the line would be:
>
> if (foo == bar)
>
>Where a space would be present after the keyword. It occurred to me
>that there could potentially be a recognition penalty for the
>keyword in the first case.
>
>My question is, does anybody know of any psychology of programming
>or related research that can help to solve this dilemma? I can't
>think of anything off the top of my head.
>
>Thanks!
>
>Chris Douce
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