Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp
Path: cantaloupe.srv.cs.cmu.edu!das-news2.harvard.edu!news2.near.net!news.mathworks.com!yeshua.marcam.com!charnel.ecst.csuchico.edu!olivea!news.hal.COM!decwrl!netcomsv!netcom.com!hbaker
From: hbaker@netcom.com (Henry G. Baker)
Subject: Re: Why do people like C? (Was: Comparison: Beta - Lisp)
Message-ID: <hbakerCy9Epn.EK5@netcom.com>
Organization: nil
References: <Cxxwx0.1nC@rheged.dircon.co.uk> <Cy1H5H.5I8@cogsci.ed.ac.uk> <38icti$132@goanna.cs.rmit.oz.au>
Date: Wed, 26 Oct 1994 02:53:47 GMT
Lines: 26

In article <38icti$132@goanna.cs.rmit.oz.au> ok@goanna.cs.rmit.oz.au (Richard A. O'Keefe) writes:
>Kaisler's book on Interlisp says, on p255, "I have found that it
>helps me read my programs by breaking up the literal atom names with
>periods (.) or dashes (-).  The latter works most of the time, but CLISP
>does have a tendency to interpret such names as the subtraction of two
>variables.  ... Consider some of the following atom names: ...
>	sentence.scanner
>	number.of.characters
>It is unfortunate that most of the atom and function names used in Interlisp
>do not follow this philosophy."  I think Kaisler is a member of the Lisp
>(but not "LisP") community in good standing.  I know that in Interlisp I
>tended to use dots or underscores.  I for one regard
>	a-name-with-several-parts
>	a.name.with.several.parts
>	a_name_with_several_parts
>as far more readable than
>	aNameWirthSeveralParts

For what it's worth, I have a paper from ACM Sigplan Ada Letters in my
ftp directory on how to mechanically map common lisp longnames into
Ada identifiers in a _readable_ way.  The same techniques will
probably work for other languages, as well.

      Henry Baker
      Read ftp.netcom.com:/pub/hbaker/README for info on ftp-able papers.

