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<font size=3>While the group is on the topic of Wirth and 'Wirthian
nature'... I think some background might help, particularly for the
younger people....<br><br>
In 1985 I attended a conference in Palo Alto, California, of the Modula 2
Users' Association. There were about 150 of us there, possibly
including some of you. It was perhaps the most high-powered
intellectual group (of that size) I've ever been in. More than half
of those present were compiler writers. Borland had a couple of
guys there showing off a pre-beta version of their Turbo Modula 2
compiler (running in a 64K DOS environment) that I later beta tested, but
that never got released.<br><br>
On the last day of the conference, I asked the group to take a straw vote
on whether the underscore should be permitted in Modula 2
indentifiers. (Wirth excluded underscores from the language
specification, and none of the compilers had them. Modula 2 is case
sensitive, and Wirth modeled identifiers InMixedCaseFormatLikeThis, a
format that many people, including me, can't stand to look at.)<br><br>
To my utter astonishment, the conference deteriorated from worthy
intellectual discussions into "religion". The group
divided roughly in half between pro-underscorist and
anti-underscorist. The two Borland guys were in the
pro-underscorist group. <br><br>
The reasons in favor of the underscore are several and obvious, and
today, most languages support them.<br><br>
There is only *ONE* reason that was offered by the anti-underscorist
group to exclude underscores from the language... and it was an
emotionally-charged reason. Guess what it was? Here it
is:<br><br>
"Underscores are not Wirthian."<br><br>
These otherwise brilliant people were worshipping Wirth to the point of
absurdity. I talked with Wirth on the phone once, and he's not a
die-hard anti-underscorist. He's a humble professor who NEVER had
any idea Pascal would become so hugely important in the world. Had
I been in the right place at the right time, I'm pretty sure I could have
convinced him to include the underscore in the Modula 2 spec.<br><br>
Mark Emerson</font></body>
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