Re: Quick question about Ada code formatting.

["Alex R. Mosteo" <devnull@mailinator.com>]

Stephen Leake wrote:
> "Randy Brukardt" <randy@rrsoftware.com> writes:
> 
> 
>>"Pascal Obry" <pascal@obry.net> wrote in message
>>news:43F872C4.50505@obry.net...
>>
>>>Georg Bauhaus a �crit :
>>>
>>>
>>>>They can indicate a major block. For example in Matt's AI 302
>>>>implementation, there are blank lines between many executable
>>>>statements. There are two blank lines between most, if not all,
>>>>subprograms.
>>>
>>>Between subprograms I prefer the "GNAT style" header box:
>>>
>>>  ----------------------
>>>  -- Process_Whatever --
>>>  ----------------------
>>>
>>>  procedure Process_Whatever is
>>>  ...
>>>
>>>Far clearer than 2 blank lines IMHO.
>>
>>But extremely hard to maintain. We used a style like that in the Janus/Ada
>>compiler, and we found that we were spending a lot of time lining up the
>>closing hyphens ever time the comment changed in some way. 
> 
> 
> Yes. One of the projects I'm on (GWindows) also requires this style.
> After the first couple of days, I wrote an Emacs macro to write the
> comment for me.
> 
> Customizable tools are essential.
> 
> Just out of curiosity; has any GPS user out there written a macro like
> that for GPS? In general, how easy is it to write macros for GPS?

GPS already has a macro for this, you simply have to give a key binding 
to it. I personally use Ctrl+B and voil�, subprogram box with null effort.

Otherwise I agree that it would be quite painful.

>>After all, the idea isn't to carry any information, but to simply to
>>separate the procedures. (Comments that repeat what is obviously known by
>>reading the source code are evil, IMHO, so I find this comment wasteful.)
>>Perhaps a better approach would be to include a dashed line separator
>>between procedures -- but that takes *three* lines, and since you never have
>>enough screen real estate, so it seems like a waste.
> 
> 
> Right on :). 
>