[M3devel] "target specific pragmas"?

[hendrik at topoi.pooq.com]

On Fri, Feb 15, 2008 at 04:41:09PM -0600, Rodney M. Bates wrote:
> I view this as more significant than it would first appear.  More
> important than readability is that delimiters with several letters
> in all caps are more PROMINENT.  This makes it quicker seeing the
> overall structure of a piece of code before looking at the deeper
> details such as which variable is being manipulated.
> 
> Up to now, every person I have discussed it with who has spent enough
> time coding with this style of delimiters to get over their initial
> aversion has agreed the prominence of all caps makes the code structure
> easier to see quickly.  Even Ada programmers who had significant prior
> experience in Modula-2 have preferred all caps in Ada (Ada is case-
> insensitive, so you can do it as you please.)
> 
> As for readability, I recall seeing research some years back that
> showed all caps are less readable than lower case, that is, people
> read all caps slower and/or with less accuracy.  For the delimiters,
> prominence is more important, especially since their vocabulary is
> far smaller than that of identifiers and doesn't change from program
> to program.

As long as you don't have both else and elsf as keywords in the same 
language!  It works find in lower-case but is hopeless in upper.

> As for esthetics, speaking for myself, after many years, I still think
> all caps reserved words are uglier than mud fences, but I happily accept
> that as the cost of easier scanning of code.
> 
> It would be nice we had a standard character code that could handle
> lower case, bold face, as in the Algol 60 "publication language".
> That would be prominent and look great too.

Really, there should be nothing preventing us from writing editors that 
display all-upper-case words as red lower-case words, and m3-to-ps 
converters that print them as bold-face lower-case.

-- hendrik