Obfuscated Ada

Obfuscated Ada

[claveman]

     Whenever questions of style arise, particularly the issue of "best" 
style, Robert Dewar usually reiterates his claim that a particular style 
is less important than that everyone use the same style.  I just had an 
experience that illustrates the validity of this claim, at least periph-
erally.  Maybe the real issue here is the confusion that can be caused 
by using a wildly unusual style.

     I was doing a grep-like search on some Ada code that I'm unfamiliar 
with and the following line was displayed:

  procedure REQUEST_BLOCK (BLOCK : in CHARACTER) is RETURN16 : INT16;

     I stared at that line for quite some time, trying to figure out 
what it was.  I began to suspect the compilers that allowed it, but 
since one of them was DEC Ada a compiler error seemed unlikely.  It even 
took me a few seconds seeing the line in context before the penny fi-
nally dropped.

				Charlie