Not sure that continuous prose would be an appropriate test - for reasons mentioned in earlier post. I would be interested, however, in researching identifier and code readability using the two approaches with novice programmers. Setting valid criteria would probably be a lot of work.
Peter -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Behalf Of Lionel Draghi Sent: 02 December 2003 23:01 To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: PPIG discuss: Effect of letter casing on readability Lindsay Marshall wrote: >>Are you serious? >> >> > >I hope he is - I find things with underbars in them unreadable in the extreme - the under_bar pulls the eye down by pretending to be some kind of weird descender or something and makes things difficult to read. > > 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. (And, as i said, underscores are easy to display or print as spaces, althrough i personally won't do that). On the other hand, you will always need some effort to understand identifiers without spaces, and I think this is a much bigger problem. But maybe do we both just fell confortable with what we are used to read? 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. Anyone willing to bet with me on the result? :-) I personally bet the second group will be 30% faster! -- Lionel Draghi http://swpat.ffii.org/index.fr.html ---------------------------------------------------------------------- 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/ --- Incoming mail is certified Virus Free. Checked by AVG anti-virus system (http://www.grisoft.com). Version: 6.0.536 / Virus Database: 331 - Release Date: 03/11/2003 ---------------------------------------------------------------------- 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/
