Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP
Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watnot!watmath!clyde!rutgers!lll-lcc!pyramid!decwrl!sun!shannon
From: shannon@sun.UUCP
Newsgroups: comp.windows.x
Subject: Re: Long names in System V
Message-ID: <16332@sun.uucp>
Date: Wed, 8-Apr-87 02:44:45 EST
Article-I.D.: sun.16332
Posted: Wed Apr  8 02:44:45 1987
Date-Received: Sat, 11-Apr-87 05:03:30 EST
References: <040187.111854.dan@ibm.com> <311@desint.UUCP> <776@jumbo.dec.com> <3059@jade.BERKELEY.EDU>
Organization: Sun Microsystems, Inc. - Mtn View, CA
Lines: 30

In article <3059@jade.BERKELEY.EDU>, oster@lapis.berkeley.edu (David Phillip Oster) writes:
> The underscore as a word separator has its origin in systems with a
> limited character set: no upper and lower case, just upper case and
> underscore.

Got any examples?  All the systems I know of that were stuck with upper
case only are from the days when the ASCII character set didn't have an
underscore, it had a backarrow instead.  People usually used $ in those
days to separate words.

> I find it quite painful to read and write names using the underscore as
> separator. For me, ChkMskEv.c is much easier to read then chk_msk_ev.c.

Truly warped!  :-)  I'd love to take a poll, but I doubt it would do any
good.  I suspect a lot of it is just what you are used to, and I'm used
to my words being separated by white space, and _ is a close approximation
to white space.

> The extra length of the latter form also gets on my nerves.  After all,
> these things are _names_ not _sentences_ 

I agree about the length of names.  I really hate variable or subroutine
names that have a little story in them, like
convert_widget_to_extra_large_gadget (or ConvertWidgetToExtraLargeGadget
to you).

All of this has very little to do with X, so let's get off this subject or
find some other newsgroup to move it to (comp.lang.style???).

					Bill