Re: ACM Ada Letters

[Marin David Condic <nobody@noplace.com>]

Georg Bauhaus wrote:
> 
> No, no, no, the alignment can be done (not overriden) by the
> formatting program, either by respecting the space character count,
> or by using an alignment algorithm using whatever fonts you have
> chosen!  You type plain characters.  The PP program is Ada-aware,

How does it know what fonts I have chosen? It either needs to do it on 
the fly or it needs to store that information with the program text. 
Same with possible variations in formatting style, etc. Either you 
rebuild it every time (and no possible consistencey between when done by 
my program and when done by yours.) or you have to store some 
information with the file (and then you need a convention for doing that.)



> 
> So there is no need for: 
> 
Yes there is - see above. Yes, you can write some formatting tool that 
might go do some default actions on Ada source text and it might look 
half-way nice, but the thing is, someone is going to quickly say "I want 
Times" or "I Want Arial" or I want "Bookman Old Style" - not to mention 
a wide range of possible formatting styles. Hence either the tool is 
extremely limited and fixed in what it does or the user has to specify 
options every time it is formatting some code, or you have to store 
formatting information with the code - especially if you want to 
transmit the code to someone else and have them see it the way you did it.

I'm not saying it can't be done - but if most Ada programmers wanted 
some kind of typesetting capability for their source code, it seems to 
make sense that the best way to do it would be with some kind of markup 
kept inside the code. That's basically the way most word processors do it.

> 
> Reminds me of the widespread use of spaces, tabs, and pressing
> RETURN in place of using paragraph styles, automatic indenation,
> automatic or forced page breaking, automatic keep-together features,
> etc. that typesetting software and word processors have had for
> some time know...


Ahhh, the Good Old Days! :-) I *like* plain-old-ASCII and the limited 
formatting it makes possible. Its simple. It works. And not everything 
needs to be gold-plated. For program source code, I find it quite 
adequate and of minimal fuss. For publishing a magazine, its 
insufficient - but I don't do that very often.

Case in point: Once upon a time, if someone wanted to send a memo around 
to the staff - they might have hand-scrawled it and xeroxed it and had 
it going around the office in 15 minutes. Now that same someone might 
spend hours organizing a memo, complete with clip art and graphics and 
other stuff to make it look really spiffy. It's a *memo*! Not an 
illuminated manuscript! The object of the game is to communicate the 
information quickly and inexpensively and yet word processing has 
probably made for way more wasted energy than we used to have in this 
area. You can no longer make a resume or a presentation without 
sophisticated typesetting and graphic arts. I think its overkill.

I'm sure there are ways of auto-formatting Ada source text and using 
proportional fonts, etc. I just don't think its necessarily very useful 
or something most programmers want to spend their time doing. Even 
plain-old-ASCII "pretty printers" have their weaknesses - they often 
don't format in the manner I personally would like or give you other 
sorts of mysery. (Like why is it GPS won't let me specify 4 spaces for 
indent instead of the default 3?) They can be useful, but they often are 
not the norm for many developers. Maybe there are too many elements of 
taste in formatting to make it possible to cater to everyone with a 
program? Maybe not all judgements about what looks good can be codified?

MDC


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Marin David Condic
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