You perhaps need to bear in mind an overall context, when thinking of readibility. As a Pascal programmer I like to write words in a style according to identifier type. For example, procedure names and constants are always in capitals, thereby necessitating that underscores be used YEN_TO_DOLLAR. Thus variables must appear partly capitalised - yenToDollar.
----- Original Message ----- From: "Richard A. O'Keefe" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: <discuss@ppig.org> Sent: Monday, September 04, 2006 4:12 AM Subject: PPIG discuss: Word separation and identifier readability > This sounds like one of the things that *must* have been studied > properly by someone, but I have been unable as yet to find any > published empirical results: > > Are multiword identifiers easier to read if the words are separated > (by hyphens as in COBOL or lisp or underscores as in Ada or C) > or if they are run together in baStudlyCaps style? > > I have searched the PPIG mail archive, so I am aware that there has been > work on *typography*, which comes close but doesn't ring the bell, and I > have found published work about using whole words or abbreviations, which > again comes close but doesn't ring the bell. I am also aware of the > advice in the Ada Quality and Style Guidelines (which has no reference to > any published work on this particular topic) and in 'man perlstyle', and > in Betrand Meyer's OOSC book. I've also spent a couple of hours trawling > the web. > > Sufficiently old studies may fail to ring the bell for another reason: > the readability difference, if any, between ATROPHY and A_TROPHY is > arguably different from that between aTrophy and a_trophy. > > ---------------------------------------------------------------------- > PPIG Discuss List (discuss@ppig.org) > Discuss admin: http://limitlessmail.net/mailman/listinfo/discuss > Announce admin: http://limitlessmail.net/mailman/listinfo/announce > PPIG Discuss archive: http://www.mail-archive.com/discuss%40ppig.org/ ---------------------------------------------------------------------- PPIG Discuss List (discuss@ppig.org) Discuss admin: http://limitlessmail.net/mailman/listinfo/discuss Announce admin: http://limitlessmail.net/mailman/listinfo/announce PPIG Discuss archive: http://www.mail-archive.com/discuss%40ppig.org/
