Re: Bad coding standards

[Marin David Condic <mcondic.nospam@acm.org>]

Robert Dewar wrote:

> Yes, that is of course true, nevertheless it is an advantage
> if everyone, or at least most folks, agree on a consistent
> style, as it makes discussion easier (it has for example
> been a consistent annoyance in C that there are several
> conventions for the use of {}
>

Oh sure. If there was a well defined and accepted standard for Ada
programming in general, it is better for people to stick with that than
go off inventing something of their own for every given project. I
recall looking at the Software Productivity Consortium's efforts in this
area and adopted many of the style guides in my efforts. However, my
comment to my boss at that time was: "Nice standard. I'd really hate to
get audited against it though." That pretty much burried it for our
projects. Just way too much detail for being enforceable. I circulated
it with other developers and strongly recommended that they look it over
and try to utilize it. I just didn't want an internal or external
auditor to start going through reams of our code and ding us at every
violation. That can get very costly and all you're doing is dealing with
cosmetic things that don't impact The Bottom Line as much as a slipped
delivery date would.

IMHO, if you have a style guide that can be written in - say - oh... ten
pages or less? - then you probably have something that can reasonably be
utilized and enforced on a project. The SPC's style guide was well over
this page limit.

>
> The fact that indentation is strongly suggested by the RM
> has meant that pretty much everyone uses the same indentation
> style, which is an advantage.
>

Definitely. Syntactically, Ada tends to indent better than C/C++ -
especially when you look at the kinds of "tricks" that your garden
variety C programmer likes to pull. (Doing all the work of a loop in the
iteration scheme, for example) The standard sets an example which
generally tends to get followed. But I've seen programs where
indentation may vary from 2..3..4 spaces. No clear agreement about how
many are required. Does it matter? Maybe a little. Are other ARM
conventions important - such as character case or where to break long
statements or parameter lists, etc? I think that most Ada code I've seen
tends to at least be reminicent of the ARM, but some of the code
examples there are not to my liking and I wouldn't blame developers for
establishing different ones. We may never get full agreement on what
style looks best, so I'd still go with at least having a consistent
standard on a project by project basis. And the standard should not be
long or rigid or it simply won't get followed. (Remember "The
Mandate"... :-)

MDC
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Marin David Condic - Quadrus Corporation - http://www.quadruscorp.com/
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