Re: Ada95 Pretty-Printers

["John G. Volan" <johnvolan@sprintmail.com>]

Thanks to everyone who suggested running emacs in batch mode. We've got
it doing case adjustment and indentation for us now, and we've been able
to hook it into Apex in place of its pretty-printer.  So what if it
doesn't do reformatting -- what self-respecting engineer would want a
tool to decide where to put the line-breaks anyway? :-)

The only downside is that it's pretty slow. The indentation algorithm is
tailored for interactive editing: It's great at indenting the line
you're currently editing, and you don't notice the time it spends
backtracking to see what the indentation level should be.  But when it's
doing all that backtracking repeatedly on every line in a batch
traversal through a file, that's pretty wasteful.

We're debating whether to mangle up a new lisp script to do a one-pass
indenting traversal, but the original ada-mode source is a bit confusing
-- it's hard to tell what can be ripped out.  It might be more
worthwhile for us to look at using ASIS/GNAT as the basis of a pretty
printer. That way we could actually get active reformatting -- but the
way _we_ want it.  For the curious, ASIS/GNAT can be found at: 

   http://www.acm.org/sigada/WG/asiswg/ASIS_GNAT_9705.html

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  (Name       => "John G. Volan",
   Employer   => "Texas Instruments Advanced C3I Systems, San Jose, CA",
   Work_Email => "johnv@ti.com",
   Home_Email => "johnvolan@sprintmail.com",
   Slogan     => "Ada95: World's *FIRST* International-Standard OOPL",
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                 "nondeterministic behavior now? :-) ");
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