> OK, but i personally never meet a programmer complaining about this, so > i suppose that most people get used to underscore in a short period.
Pleased to meet you - I hate them and moan about them when people use them. > (And, as i said, underscores are easy to display or print as spaces, > althrough i personally won't do that). They are much harder to type. > On the other hand, you will always need some effort to understand > identifiers without spaces, and I think this is a much bigger problem. Use short identifiers. I hate long identifiers too - they just make code unweildy and hard to read. > But maybe do we both just fell confortable with what we are used to read? That is undoubtedly true. > So i suggest a simple experiment : let's compare the average speed to > read some short story > 1 - with all blanks removed, > 2 - with all blanks replaced with _, > by two groups of peoples with no programming background. How is this relevant? Code is not a story. If your code is well written then the variable names are all quite different so easily recognised. Spaces act in code act slightly differently from spaces in narrative text I would maintain. Even if it were relevant your test is unfair as you have forgotten to capitalise the starts of all the words - you need to show where the breaks are in english orelseitbecomesslightlyhardertoread orEvenAmbiguousIfYouAreNotCareful. (No, I can't be bothered to make up an ambiguous sentence but I'm sure you can see what I mean) Of course there are lots of natural languages where spacing is not used as in English - Japanese for example tends to run strings of characters (both Kanji and Kana) together which is one of the reasons why trying to learn to read is hard : you can't tell where the gaps are. Doesn't bother the japanese thought. L. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- 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/
