Re: example of machine generated Ada ?

[Martin <martin@thedowies.com>]

On Thursday, October 3, 2013 7:14:33 AM UTC+1, Niklas Holsti wrote:
> On 13-10-03 07:10 , Robert Love wrote:
> 
> > On 2013-10-02 17:37:04 +0000, Patrick said:
> 
> > 
> 
> >> Hi Everyone
> 
> >>
> 
> >> I am just daydreaming about generating Ada from another language.
> 
> >>
> 
> >> Several languages use C as an intermediate language but hand written C
> 
> >> is hard to read and machine generated is even more painful. Ada might
> 
> >> make for reliable, readable machine generated code.
> 
> >>
> 
> >> Thanks-Patrick
> 
> > 
> 
> > There was a product in the 90s called Matrixx, it let you draw flow
> 
> > charts and type in algorithms and drag connections between components
> 
> > your created graphically.  You pushed the button and out popped some of
> 
> > the ugliest Ada you can imagine.  My point is you can have code
> 
> > generators but there is no guarantee of the quality, readablity or
> 
> > maintainablity.
> 
> 
> 
> If I remember correctly, the motivation for including a goto statement
> 
> in Ada was that automatic code generators might need it. This perhaps
> 
> shows what kind of code was expected from such generators...


GOTOs in auto-generated code are not usual...in the late 80's Jackson Structured Programming (JSP) diagrams -> COBOL often used GOTOs...but that was fine...it allowed implementation of the "Backtracking" technique in the JSP method and also, "who cares" what the auto-generated code looks like - you're supposed to be only looking at the diagrams.

It's the same reason we don't care about the 'gotos' in the assembler from your-favourite-Ada-compiler :-)

-- Martin