Steven, >Does anyone know of studies investigating the effect of casing on readability of >program source code?
What do you mean by readability? Developers read the source for a number of reasons, using a variety of reading techniques and their performance can be measured in various ways (eg speed, accuracy). As I understand the research that has been done on text the largest factor affecting speed of reading is amount of practice. The times/helevtic font difference (around 7%) has been found to be mainly due to differences in the font width (ie how many characters a reader can take in during an eye fixation). There has been some good research on single character recognition. However, words are not recognized a character at a time (perhaps not even in Chinese) and the 'whole word' effect can have a big impact on performance. Identifier naming conventions are often mentioned. However, I have checked many programs conformance to naming conventions that their authors claim to be following, only to find many exceptions. It has been said that different languages have naming conventions that are specific to them. I have found no evidence for this claim (apart from Fortran names often being short). You might be interested in looking at some work I have done on readability and identifier naming. See sentences 763 and 782 at www.knosof.co.uk/cbook/cbook.html derek -- Derek M Jones tel: +44 (0) 1252 520 667 Knowledge Software Ltd mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Applications Standards Conformance Testing http://www.knosof.co.uk ---------------------------------------------------------------------- PPIG Discuss List ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) Discuss admin: http://limitlessmail.net/mailman/listinfo/discuss Announce admin: http://limitlessmail.net/mailman/listinfo/announce PPIG Discuss archive: http://www.mail-archive.com/discuss%40ppig.org/
