🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <1173@mtxinu.UUCP> sh...@mtxinu.COM (Melinda Shore) writes:
>I first encountered it in the wacky world of MacIntosh programming around
>1984 (shortly after they first came out).  I attended MacHigh School (how
>[...]

All this leads me to suspect that the compundNames habit originated
with Smalltalk (1980 or thereabouts) where class objects must have
an initial capital letter (as in `ClassWideObject'), and instance
objects must start with a l/c letter (as in `instanceVariable').
Also names can only (if I remember right) consist of alphnumerics.

Caveat: This is just a guess and has no basis whatsoever in fact.
		I'm probably wrong!
--
  Mike Morris                        ::   "The gods gave humans a sense
  mike@cside1.UUCP                   ::   of humour to make up for giving
  ...!ddsw1!olsa99!oct1!cside1!mike  ::   them sex..."  - Terry Pratchett
-- 
  Mike Morris                        ::   "The gods gave humans a sense
  mike@cside1.UUCP                   ::   of humour to make up for giving
  ...!ddsw1!olsa99!oct1!cside1!mike  ::   them sex..."  - Terry Pratchett

In article <1990Apr5.122730.7951@cside1.uucp> mike@cside1.UUCP (Mike Morris) writes:
>In article <1173@mtxinu.UUCP> sh...@mtxinu.COM (Melinda Shore) writes:
>>I first encountered it in the wacky world of MacIntosh programming around
>>1984 (shortly after they first came out).  I attended MacHigh School (how
>>[...]
>
>All this leads me to suspect that the compundNames habit originated
>with Smalltalk (1980 or thereabouts) where class objects must have
>an initial capital letter (as in `ClassWideObject'), and instance
>objects must start with a l/c letter (as in `instanceVariable').
>Also names can only (if I remember right) consist of alphnumerics.
>
>Caveat: This is just a guess and has no basis whatsoever in fact.
>		I'm probably wrong!

I expect CompoundNames evolved simultaneously around the world during
the 1970's when computer users made the switchover from all-upper-case
devices to mixed-case ones.  It was immediately evident that some use
of lower case was much more readable, but there was no immediate
consensus on exact usage.  Just as a data point, I was at Dartmouth
during the late '70's.  The issue of case style was undecided,
although coding style in general was emphasized.  (Needless to say,
this was using languages in which case was insignificant).  Some
people tried to follow English conventions, capitalizing the first
letters of statements, others capitalized variable names, some used
capitalization for the sort of type information described above (e.g.
capitalizing PL/I function names to distinguish them from arrays),
and, of course, some elected to capitalize the first letters of
"words" in variable names, as in the Macintosh usage.  A side note:
although many languages supported the use of underscores in
identifiers, at that point the ASCII underscore character was rendered
on many terminals and printers as a backarrow, which to some extent
detracted from its use.  

Perhaps it's just the bias of my background, but I object to enforced
style issues: I consider capitalization conventions all very well when
it's just a convention in a caseless language, but I don't care for it
at all in case-sensitive environment.  I programmed in Pascal for
Macintoshes quite happily spelling everything in all-lower-case, but I
seem to recall some confusion when the first Mac C's started coming
out: I believe at least one version faithfully reproduced Apple's
quirky capitalization (thus enforcing it) while another normalized
everything to lowercase, which would be more natural for C programmers
but confusing the documentation issue.  As a matter of personal taste,
I consider it insane to use the identifiers "FooBarWidget" and
"fooBarWidget" in the same program with two distinct meanings, but
hey, call me an old fogey.
-
Jim Perry   pe...@apollo.hp.com    HP/Apollo, Chelmsford MA
This particularly rapid unintelligible patter 
isn't generally heard and if it is it doesn't matter.