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> Does anyone know why Wirth never modernized his style?

Readability. It's easier to read the source code with uppercase keywords. (I think Wirth once said that code is written once but read many times). See this source code - https://raw.githubusercontent.com/rochus-keller/OberonSystem... - to get an idea of this (the uppercase keywords allow you to easily scan the blocks of code). Ofcourse, one can claim that the same can be achieved better today with colour-coded keywords.

If it really bothers you, I think the Oberon+ IDE - https://github.com/rochus-keller/Oberon - gives you an option to disable this and use lowercase keywords.

1 comments

> It's easier to read the source code with uppercase keywords.

This is aesthetics, I won't claim that what I'm saying is more than a (perhaps popular) subjective opinion. But I will point out that at least the way I read programs, the KEYWORDS are the OPPOSITE of what I want to EMPHASIZE when reading code.

I actually want the keywords to disappear so that my eyes can focus on the variable names and see the data flow. That, by the way, is also why punctuation to mark blocks { ... } is so much easier for me to visually parse than BEGIN ... END.

You could use a syntax highlighting theme where reserved words are gray for instance (if you want them to fade into the background).