On Thu, 5 Feb 2004, Russell, Richard wrote:
> I am curious as to why you included conversion of case to lower in
> statement lines. I would think that use of case would be a matter of
> personal style. In my own code, I prefer to keep most executable code
> in upper case, with comments in normal text style (mostly lower).
I included it because some of the existing conversion programs do it, and
I find that most people writing new F90 code also use lower-case. There
are a number of reasons why people might do this:
- It is well established that lower-case text is more legible (e.g. that
is why road signs in most countries use mostly lower-case).
- They copy the style used in other popular languages like C or Java.
- Because they can, whereas Fortran77 was generally perceived to be an
upper-case only language (let's not argue about whether this perception
was correct or not).
The main argument to the contrary is that it's nice to have it really
obvious which lines are statements and which are comments. But if you
also switch to using end-of-line comments, this argument becomes
irrelevant. And of course you could preserve the distinction by having
statement lines in lower-case and comments in upper-case, but most people
don't do this, for some reason.
My own opinion is that I think lower-case helps legibility, and I make
enough typos that I appreciate the help it gives me in finding my own
mistakes.
I notice that you didn't type your email all in upper-case, although
that would have been less effort: why not?
--
Clive Page,
Dept of Physics & Astronomy,
University of Leicester, U.K.
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