[Oberon] CapsLock

[Lars O]

Chris Burrows wrote:
>
> Believe it or not it was this irritation that led to the creation of
> first CPIde and then Astrobe. I designed the editor so that you could type
>  everything in lowercase (using the shift key for isolated capital
> letters). The editor recognises Oberon reserved words and keywords and
> automatically capitalises them. For example, if I type:
>
> procedure ReadInt(r: Rider; i: integer); begin
>
> The Astrobe editor's auto-capitalisation feature converts this on the fly
>  to:
>
>
> PROCEDURE ReadInt(r: Rider; i: INTEGER);
> BEGIN
>


Really, so there are some people that are annoyed with this CAPS lock
nonsense, while people like Samuel A. Falvo keep trying to convince people
that there is absolutely nothing wrong with the CAPS LOCK reserved words..
and I've talked to him about Arrays of Chars vs proper strings too, and he
thinks that yes, oberon is just fine the way it is.

CAPS LOCKS reserved words is just reinventing something called Syntax
Highlighting... but the programmer has to do the syntax highlighting
manually using caps lock instead of just letting the editor highlight the
code for you, saving programmer time. It's a debate between making the
language easy to use and type for the programmer, v.s. saving a little bit
of CPU cycles and wasted heat (entropy) out into the universe. Nickle's
Worth chose to save a few nickles of entropy and make the programmer type
out the syntax coloring, using CAPS LOCK... but little did he realize more
entropy was pumped out into the universe by the human brain and fingers
which caused just as much heat by having to reach over to Caps Lock or
SHIFT... instead of making the IDE do the syntax coloring for you.