I too took typing in 9th grade (1972) and had peaked at around 75 words per
minute properly using all 9 fingers. I feel that as a programmer we typists
can type faster as we are typing a lot of the same words over and over. But
perhaps that's slowed down by more punctuation characters being typed.

I also had an old Underwood typewriter since I was 4 and always enjoyed
typing. I was one of those nerds who typed everything except math homework
in high school as I could actually type faster (and neater) than printing or
writing. I even had one of the first home versions of an electric typewriter
as my father had a home office with a secretary.

My opinion on the mixed casing touches on something not yet touched on:
Intelligent editors. Now I know that many on this forum are in other
languages and can add my reasons for preferring upper case.

1. 99% of my client's code is long-term (legacy) that is written in
exclusively upper case as lower case probably didn't work.
2. I've been reading upper case Pick code for over 29 years and it looks
funny in mixed casing.
3. Even when I present a code example to this or the Raining Data forum, I
tend to change the typeface to Courier. Seeing code in proportional spacing
and mixed casing looks doubly strange.
4. I don't know about external editors for MV systems, but there's no real
link between the editor environment and the compiler.

The last comment comes from my limited use in VB. There, since I cannot use
a period as my 'word delimiter' in a variable, ie CUST.REC, and I don't care
for the underscore and truly dislike the $ as a delimiter, VB suggests that
you declare variables in a Constants Module.

In that module, you can "DIM CustName as String" and everywhere you type
CUSTNAME or custname or CuStNaMe it will convert it to CustName. That kind
of magic is missing in MV and as someone suggested, CustName could possibly
not be the same as CUSTNAME.

With that threat of working on this inherited MV code, I prefer upper case.
That seems to serve me well as I straddle U2 systems as well as D3 and even
older native and Microdata clients. Those older ones don't even allow lower
case. In fact, early Microdata keyboards didn't have lower case letters, you
had to use char(95) etc.

My 2 Cents
Mark Johnson

PS. My kids (18 & 21) both use 2 finger typing and I beat them every time.
On the other hand, they kill me with the T9 phone typing especially using
all of the acronyms. As programmers, I've seen many 2 finger persons who
just don't look as on the ball as they should. Not intellectually, just the
slower rate of conveying their thoughts to the computer. Despite mousing,
that's still our most prevelant form of coding.
----- Original Message -----
From: "Eric Armstrong" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: <[email protected]>
Sent: Monday, March 10, 2008 3:15 PM
Subject: RE: [U2] blank lines in code / mixed case


> Along with Robert I also took Typing (along with football, tennis, soccer)
> in High School and am glad I did.
>
> Eric
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Robert Houben [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> Sent: Monday, March 10, 2008 10:24 AM
> To: [email protected]
> Subject: RE: [U2] blank lines in code / mixed case
>
>
> BTW, to the comment about straight guys not taking typing:  I know that
they
> didn't usually, but when I was in high school back in the plasticine epoch
> (right after the Pleistocene epoch), a bunch of my friends and I took
typing
> because we thought it would be an easy course (and there were girls in
it!)
> Given my career, it was one of the most useful courses I took in High
School
> - one of the few, in fact, where I can say that I still clearly reap the
> benefits of it every day!
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