Re: Coding Standards

[Ken Garlington <garlingtonke@lmtas.lmco.com>]

Robert A Duff wrote:
> 
> By the same argument, why should programmers have to read the Ada
> manual?  After all, if you can't understand or maintain the code without
> the Standard, then the language standard is not making the code more
> readable.  For example, if you don't understand the type checking rules,
> then type checking won't help you understand the program.  ;-)

(Oops - let's try that again...)

Funny you should mention this. We have a lot of non-programmers that read
(but do not modify) our Ada code. These folks include hardware engineers,
test engineers, etc. who need to understand a particular detail about
an algorithm. They rarely have to resort to an Ada manual to
understand a type definition. This is the wonderful thing about Ada: It's
fairly intuitive to read. Or at least, it should be. I gather you feel
differently. Certainly, I would expect someone _modifying_ the code to be 
familiar with how the language works, which they could get from the ARM.
However, I've often reused code successfully without any knowledge of the
original coding standards.

It also seems to me that your argument regarding the language manual is also
deficient, in that it assumes that if requring knowledge from one source is
necessary, that requiring knowledge from two sources is better. If that's the
case, why not use obscure sequences of letters for all declarations, with a 
third document definining what these sequences actually mean?  Generally, I
would think the _less_ complicated you make the process of understanding and
maintaining software, the better.

> I can assure you that if you work on a project where I'm the boss, and
> it's written in Ada, you will be required to know Ada, and to know
> project-wide conventions about Ada, and so on.

This still begs the question I've asked on a couple of occasions: What
happens when your code is used on my project? If I reuse your code, am
I forced to use your coding standards, in order to keep the code maintainable?
This would seem to be a significant deterrent to its reuse.

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