Re: Declaration design preference: type or name first

James Harris wrote:
> As a matter of preference the declarations of some languages put the
> type before the name such as
> 
>    int x = 2;
> 
> where others put the variable name before the type as in
> 
>    x: integer := 2;
> 
> I can see advantages to each and would be interested to know what
> other language designers and programmers (i.e. the customers of
> language designers) prefer.

Others have made comments about which is easier to parse.  I think
that's a concern, but to me a more im****tant concern is what reads
most naturally.

And for that, I draw a parallel to human language.  Human languages
are almost evenly split among those which have an adjective-noun
order and those which have a noun-adjective order.  English, which
is my native language, has an adjective-noun order ("black cat");
Spanish has a noun-adjective order ("gato negro")[1].

Of course history has shown it's a mistake to try to force a formal
language to be too much like (unrealistically like) natural language,
but I think where a choice is arbitrary, it can be helpful to choose
something that makes sense by analogy to a natural language.  For
that reason, and because I'm accustomed to adjective-noun, and because
I view the type name as functioning as an adjective and the symbol
being declared functioning as a noun, I like the type to come before
the symbol.  People whose native language has the opposite word order
might be comfortable with something different.

   - Logan

[1]  Interesting link on that subject:
      http://www-users.cs.york.ac.uk/~susan/cyc/a/adj.htm