I am admittedly a dinosaur of the upper-case bent with U2. Before I put on my flame suit, hear me out..
We developers type thousands - possibly even millions - of characters of code per year To press the letter "R" with caps lock on or off is only one keypress - keeping in mind the state of the cApS LocK. To type READU then is only 5. ReadU however, is 7 - an increase of 40%. Now, assuming that a typical program is 4000 characters, there's a potential of an additional 1000+ shift keypresses just to maintain case. Meaningless, you say? Everything we do takes an investment of time, and even a fraction of a second can turn into a significant investment when multiplied times millions of occurrences. In Java, PHP, etc., mixed case code has been the norm from the beginning. People don't think about writing these languages in upper case because they were never designed to be written that way. BASIC, however has its roots in upper case, and - here's my big point - not being forced into mixed case provides a significant opportunity to produce more code in less time simply because of the reduced number of keystrokes. Also on the topic of productivity, a variable named ITEM.CUSTOMER has one presentation, no variants. Mixing case on this variable produces a number of variants which may be easily mistyped thus potentially increasing debugging time. I will admit, because I don't use mixed case I don't know if there's a compiler option that will allow ITEM.CUSTOMER and ItEm.CuStoMerto be the same variable, but even if such a thing exists, isn't that just adding confusion to whomever has to compile this thing six months from now? Those who have gone through my training have likely heard my rule about "there's a time and place for everything, and it's not always and it's not never". Anyone who "always" writes in mixed case regardless of the language or environment, or anyone who "never" writes in mixed case for the same reason may very well be missing productivity gains, regardless of how distasteful the caps lock key might be to them personally. Yes, I do use mixed case - in user prompts - because the audience (i.e. users) interprets meaning in the case of a message. And one last point to really fire up some folks: To those who think mixed case is more readable, I offer this: It's syntax, not literature. While we should do everything we can to make the code as human readable as possible, greater readability gains are available through structural protocol than changing READU to ReadU. To put so much energy in all these extra keystrokes and then to create a 3000 line routine with 1200 GOTOs (oops, I meant "GoTo"'s) is ... in my opinion... a lot of effort with minimal - if any - ROI. So, without turning this into a holy war, why do you prefer mixed case? -K ------- u2-users mailing list [email protected] To unsubscribe please visit http://listserver.u2ug.org/
