Re: GNAT-2005

[Georg Bauhaus <bauhaus@futureapps.de>]

On Mon, 2006-11-13 at 20:35 +0000, Simon Wright wrote:

> I've just spotted -gnatyu -- check no unneccessary blank lines -- now
> there's something to have a style war about!

Yeah. War against egalitarianism! Different uniforms in different
schools, or else style fighters can't recognize their enemy  :-)

Of course, it does help if a program is suitably dressed.
Tailor Pretty's art will help us to smooth out whatever
rough edges our programs must inevitably show. This is both
marketing, and also an important social issue.

I wish we had a switch that generates style setups paying attention
to today's output media. These generate a rather diverse set of
appearances even with the same style options set.
Most of us don't use typewriters any more. Hence,
what's the point of defining rules about white space, paren offsets,
and other cosmetic issues when your frame of reference is the fixed
width character model which does *not* specify the effects of
choosing this or that font, color, thickness, etc.?

By analogy, how about a rule stating that names should be red,
keywords should be green.....

When I open a light blue xterm and connect to some GNU/Linux
machine it is likely that I see the effects of
alias ls='ls --color=auto'
That is, directory names printed in light blue on light blue...
--auto does not automatically adapt to the terminal setting,
but this is where it prints its output.

I'm happy to find the "end if" belonging to in "if" aligned
with that "if", even when the "end if" appears after an
unnecessary empty line. Whatever color, font or parenthesis
spacing is in effect.

Georg 
Anyone in favor of -gnatyT, check no unnecessary title boxes? ;-)