From: Robert Klemme <bob.news@...>
Date: 2005-10-06T21:26:49+09:00
Subject: Re: Object Orientation

Dave Howell wrote:
> On Oct 5, 2005, at 8:56, Robert Klemme wrote:
>
>> Krekna Mektek wrote:
>>> By the way, why are methods not named following the
>>> lowercaseUppercase convention, as in Java?
>>> This way I can see more directly that something is a method, and not
>>> an instance variable.
>>>
>>> I'd like to do it that way, but am not sure if this is against some
>>> Ruby philosophy..
>>
>> No problem with that.  It's just, um, that you will die a slow and
>> painful
>> death if you use CamelCase.  Don't ask me how it works - it's Matz
>> Magic(TM) built right into your Ruby runtime.
>
> I've always found underscores hard to type and annoying to read, so
> I've never used them in any of my programming.
>
> All of my code looks like
>
> def newMartini
> attr_reader :withOlive
>
> def initialize(dryness)
>
> end
>
> def shakenNotStirred
> end
> end
>
> and so on. It's regrettable (and generally a poor design choice) that
> case is significant, so you can't capitalize the initial character of
> methods or variables, but other than that, name them as you like.
>
> ++ warning: rant below ++
>
> [Why a poor design choice? Because except for certain specific
> enclaves in computer programming (e.g. Unix, but not Mac, not
> Windows, not DEC VAX, not BASIC, not Pascal, not REXX, and not
> Modula-2, to draw from personal experience), case isn't
> "significant." Including, oh, the entire rest of the world's written
> literature. Nobody thinks that Dave and DAVE and dave are three
> different people, or that a Ph.D is different from a  PH.D. Recipes
> can have Tbsp or tbsp, and on and on and on. You'd have to look long
> and hard, or find a Unix programmer, in order to find somebody who
> thought WordPerfect was spelled differently than Wordperfect, and e.
> e. cummings gets filed after Carter but before Dostoyevsky, not
> somewhere after the Z's. Capitalization is used for readability and
> convenience, but explicit meaning, especially identification, does
> not allow itself to change through mere capitalization; a message in
> all caps states the same things as one in all lower case
> (notwithstanding the possible *implicit* messages of emphasis). An
> italic R, a lower-case R, a cursive R, a bold R, a capital R: they
> are all the same letter, and functionally interchangeable. Except in
> a tiny minority of cases. Like Unix. And Ruby.]

Huh?  How are printf(), Printf() and prinTf() in C the same?  Did I miss
something?  Case significance of identifiers is present in a lot (if not
most) major programming languages.

And you can even have capital starting letters of method names in Ruby
(although I find this utmost ugly and irritating):

>> def Foo() "bar" end
=> nil
>> Foo()
=> "bar"

Regards

    robert