Re: Bad coding standards - aesthetics are irrelevant

[Bruce or Tracy <bljacobs@hiwaay.net>]

I am late on this thread, so pardon me if I am re-stating a point
already made.  I hope I am understanding the original poster's
meaning aesthetics.  

Oh, Hi Stephen!  I was about to agree with you with out realizing who
it was I was agreeing with!

I agree about Ada formatting tool.  

IMHO, Coding Standards and Aesthetics are two separate issues, by the
way.  Coding Standars is like the ole buzz-word "Object Oriented" or
Functionally organized.  Aesthetics are appearance and readability.
However, Aesthetics are NOT irrelevant, and I guarantee you that if the
code
is not readable, it is not easily maintainable.  I am having to maintain
some code right now at work that looks something like this, and I quote: 

  My_Package_Name.My_Procedure_Name (Track_Number,Meters_Till_Impact, 
  Seconds_Till_Impact,Azimuth,Elevation,Range,Delay_In_Seconds);

instead of:

  My_Package_Name.My_Procedure_Name 
    (The_Track_Number        => Track_Number, 
     The_Meters_From_Target  => Meters_From_Targer,
     The_Seconds_Till_Impact => Seconds_Till_Impact,
     The_Weapon_Azimuth      => Azimuth,
     The_Weapon_Elevation    => Elevation,
     The_Weapon_DownRange    => Range,
     The_Seconds_Delay       => Delay_In_Seconds);

Some have even more arguments than this example.  The coders are very
good, smart
coders, they just aren't "tidy", which makes maintenance extremely
difficult, 
especially when you have 400-500 lines of this kind of format in single
procedure.

My $0.02, 
Bruce


William Starner wrote:
> 
> Stephen Leake wrote:
> >
> > "Singlespeeder" <singlespeeder@btinternet.com> writes:
> >
> > > Much of the debate on aesthetics would be needless if there was a good
> > > freely available non-proprietary tool for reformatting the code, much like
> > > the C world has 'indent'.
> >
> > There is. It's called ada-mode for Emacs. Combined with the equally
> > free gnat style checker, it's a great tool.
> >
> > What more do you want?
> 
> Something that works quickly? I use ada-mode, and have that if you want to
> indent a large array initalizer, or something in the area of the large array
> initalizer, it can get as slow as 3 seconds a line, which in the case of a 100
> line array initalizer is terribly slow.
> 
> --
> David Starner - dvdeug@hushmail.com (dstarner98@aasaa.ofe.org off vacation)