Re: Syntax of Comments (was: language design tradeoffs)

drw@euclid.mit.edu (Dale R. Worley)
Wed, 7 Oct 1992 20:46:31 GMT

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[14 earlier articles]
Re: Syntax of Comments (was: language design tradeoffs) de19@umail.umd.edu (1992-10-04)
Re: Syntax of Comments (was: language design tradeoffs) Bruce.Hoult@bbs.actrix.gen.nz (1992-10-05)
Re: Syntax of Comments (was: language design tradeoffs) tmb@arolla.idiap.ch (1992-10-06)
Re: Syntax of Comments (was: language design tradeoffs) liblit@cs.psu.edu (1992-10-06)
Re: Syntax of Comments (was: language design tradeoffs) pcbeard@ucdavis.edu (1992-10-06)
Re: Syntax of Comments (was: language design tradeoffs) kendall@centerline.com (1992-10-07)
Re: Syntax of Comments (was: language design tradeoffs) drw@euclid.mit.edu (1992-10-07)
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Newsgroups: comp.compilers,comp.human-factors
From: drw@euclid.mit.edu (Dale R. Worley)
Organization: MIT Dept. of Tetrapilotomy, Cambridge, MA, USA
Date: Wed, 7 Oct 1992 20:46:31 GMT
Keywords: syntax, design
References: 92-09-048 92-10-015

The moderator writes:
      [There are plenty of programs that highlight keywords and the like. [but]
      highlighting the keywords is probably the worst possible way to format a
      program, since the keywords are the noise. ... But printing the keywords
      in bold is an ancient tradition, at least back to Algol 60. -John]


And the habits that you learn cause you to do things differently than
you would by default: Your attention focuses on the italicized words,
not the boldface ones. Inverting the present conventions would
probably make a program unreadable!


Dale


Dale Worley Dept. of Math., MIT drw@math.mit.edu
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