[Oberon] Easier typing of capital letter keywords in Oberon

[Douglas G. Danforth]

*Edward Estlin Cummings* (October 14, 1894 – September 3, 1962), known 
as *E. E. Cummings*, with the abbreviated form of his name often written 
by others in lowercase letters as *e e cummings* (in the style of some 
of his poems—see name and capitalization 
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E._E._Cummings#Name_and_capitalization>, 
below),

was the idiot who started the lower case fad.  I laugh when I see people 
complaining about using the shift key.
That is just LAZY!

Sentences start with an upper case letter. if you start with a lower 
case letter the visual break that separates one
sentence from the next is missing.

I think the following is ugly as hell

prog

   pro do-something;
   b
     out('hello world');
   e;

b
   do-something;
e.

By the way, you don't need the ";" before END.

-Doug Danforth (or is it doug danforth?)



On 1/24/2016 3:59 PM, Lars O wrote:
> Eric Scharff wrote:
>> So, in my tinkering with both Native Oberon and Project Oberon 2013, I
>> have to say I really like Oberon (the language), but as a newbie, the
>> environment is tricky. The most obvious thing for me is that Oberon
>> doesn't seem to recognize my caps lock key. Â I know it sounds trivial,
>> but it's leading to a huge ergonomic issue for me. typing PROCEDURE or
>> INTEGER (and the other keywords) while holding down the shift key is
>> extremely uncomfortable. Typing <caps-lock>integer<caps-lock) would be an
>> improvement (all lower case typing), but still has extra keystrokes.
>> Really, I'd like to type all of the capitalized keywords in lower case,
>> and then apply a filter to my document to automatically capitalize, and
>> run such a trigger when I Edit.
> This sounds like my exact experiences with Oberon. Holding down shift key
> and typing long verbose CAPS locks words is a huge turn off to lots of
> people, despite Samuel A. Falvo's pathetic claims that it doesn't bother
> him and shouldn't bother anyone else. It's not just having to use caps
> lock key on keyboard, it's also the long verbose PROCEDURE word itself,
> which could easily be shortened to PROC or PRO. Some languages shorten
> FUNCTION to FN or FUNC or DEFUN.  I prefer FN, FUNC, or FUN. (without caps
> lock, thanks very much).
>
> This is a reason why lots of people are using Golang because you don't
> have to use pathetic verbosity just to get work done... Or why a lot of
> people chose C instead of Pascal or Ada.
>
> There are programmers who claim that you spend not very much typing out
> code, and more time thinking, therefore verbosity is a non issue. That's
> like arguing you don't spend much time opening your garage door each day,
> therefore there is no need to install a electric garage door opener which
> saves you a few seconds each day. It's not just about the time, but the
> absolute pain in the butt it is to type out words when you are
> programming. Programming should be enjoyable, not a pain in the butt.
> When I whip out Golang functions it's simple and quick. Ada, Cobol,
> Pascal, Oberon... becomes a pain, especially since Oberon also requires
> END PROCEDURENAME instead of just "end;".
>
> In C like languages such as GoLang the problem becomes the shift key
> strokes and strain required to type out { } so some people remap their
> keyboards so they don't have to use the shift key as much. Or in Lisp the
> brackets ( ) are annoying because you have to hit shift key each time.. so
> people remap keyboard... But remapping the keyboard is a pain in the butt
> too, and when you use a different computer or a friends computer, your
> keyboard mapping is non standard and you forget. Everyone starts having
> non standard keyboards it and becomes a huge pain.
>
> So the easiest language to type out without shift key strains would be
> something such as:
>
> prog
>
>    pro do-something;
>    b
>      out('hello world');
>    e;
>
> b
>    do-something;
> e.
>
> But you see you are still caught with the shift key on the brackets ( ) in
> the out() call which requires obnoxious shift key.
>
> CamelCaps or BiCaptitalization is even obnoxious because of the shift key
> strains.... which is why lisp's dashes are interesting.
>
> Golang decides to use thisStyle instead of ThisStyle to save one extra
> shift key on the first letter, which is nice, and only solves 30-50
> percent of the problem in a lot of functionNames.
>
> There is no perfect language, but I am certain that PROCEDURE is too
> obnoxious to type, as is BEGIN and END which just get in the way. Folks
> like Dijkstra argue that shortening your code with terse coding contests
> is a bad thing.. but I have a question:  in Math we use shortforms all the
> time such as + = - / * ..... Why shouldn't PROCEDURE also have a shortform
> PRO, or PROC?  Why shouldn't BEGIN also have a shortform? Or would you
> rather type out PLUS, MINUS, MULTIPLY, DIVIDE each time in your
> mathematical texts instead of using well known shortform symbols? COBOL
> anyone? Can we learn from the mistakes of COBOL and ADA, mr Dijkstra and
> mr. Wirth?  How much is a shortform worth, Wirth? A nickel?
> --
> Oberon at lists.inf.ethz.ch mailing list for ETH Oberon and related systems
> https://lists.inf.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/oberon
>

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