Re: How many of you have Ada programming careers?

[Dennis Lee Bieber <wlfraed@ix.netcom.com>]

On Sun, 8 Nov 2015 00:39:43 -0600, "Nasser M. Abbasi" <nma@12000.org>
declaimed the following:

>
>When using Python, there are lots of self.x and self.y
>and self.* all over the code. This makes the code

	And fully realized C++ tends to use this.*, Visual Basic uses me.*, Ada
doesn't have a "standard" (neither does Python -- "self" is convention,
whereas C++ and VB etc. need it as a keyword as they don't explicitly pass
the object in the parameter list).

	Those are declarative languages where all the attributes have been
pre-defined in the class definition -- one could think the compiler could
figure out what scope applies to a variable reference. Python is fully
dynamic, it must be told when something is a "stack" local (not that the
implementation has to use a stack) that goes away after the method exits,
vs an instance attribute that needs to hang around between invocations, vs
a class-wide attribute...

>very ugly to read, since class own variables must be
>references using self., I also found not have a closing
>ENDIF and END LOOP, etc.. even if it was just "}" marker,
>very confusing and made the code and the algorithms
>actually harder to read for me. I kept looking for
>a closing "}" and not finding it.
>
	Since many of us have been trained to "pretty-print" (ie; use
indentation to indicate block structure), requiring {} begin/end etc. are
superfluous to the design of the code. {} are difficult to see -- and
difficult to match up in some coding styles -- personally the convention of

if (cond) {
	<statements>
} else {
	<statements>
}

is completely confusing... If delimiters are needed, I want them to align
on the same column so I can use a straight-edge to find the blocks...

if (cond)
{
	<statements>
}
else
{
	<statements>
}

	Those languages using {} are even more problematic as the {} are
typically NOT required if <statements> is only a single statement, not a
block... That leads to things like

if (cond)
	<statement>
else
{
	<statements>
}

At least Ada uses self blocking keywords, not line-noise, and the keywords
are not optional.

-- 
	Wulfraed                 Dennis Lee Bieber         AF6VN
    wlfraed@ix.netcom.com    HTTP://wlfraed.home.netcom.com/