From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.4.4 (2020-01-24) on polar.synack.me X-Spam-Level: X-Spam-Status: No, score=-1.3 required=5.0 tests=BAYES_00,INVALID_MSGID autolearn=no autolearn_force=no version=3.4.4 X-Google-Language: ENGLISH,ASCII-7-bit X-Google-Thread: 103376,2b3c55a2e1ab7305,start X-Google-Attributes: gid103376,public From: claveman@cod.nosc.mil () Subject: Obfuscated Ada Date: 1997/04/30 Message-ID: <1997Apr30.123413.14909@nosc.mil>#1/1 X-Deja-AN: 238455483 Sender: news@nosc.mil Organization: Computer Sciences Corporation Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada Date: 1997-04-30T00:00:00+00:00 List-Id: 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