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From: Robert Dewar <robert_dewar@my-deja.com>
Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada
Subject: RE: constant string array
Date: Wed, 13 Dec 2000 00:36:09 GMT
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 <B6A1A9B09E52D31183ED00A0C9E0888C469939@nctswashxchg.nctswash.navy.mil>
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Date: 2000-12-13T00:36:09+00:00
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In article
<B6A1A9B09E52D31183ED00A0C9E0888C469939@nctswashxchg.nctswash.na
vy.mil>,
  comp.lang.ada@ada.eu.org wrote:
> As in "if () then", no matter what "()" contained.

Well the () are useless noise REGARDLESS of what they enclose
since there is no precedence issues etc in this case.

> They wanted consistency and it wasn't worth arguing,
> because "if (success) then" is no harder to read than
> "if success then"

There is no more justification for this than a silly rule
that requires all right hand sides to be in parentheses.
The argument could equally well be that

   a := (success);

is no harder to read then

   a := success;

The fact of the matter is that these noise parens which have
no function are entirely unnecessary, and coding standards
that require them are entirely misguided. In my experience,
the ONLY reason for the illogical decision to use these
in IF statements (and not for example in assignment
statements) is that people are used to syntaxes of other
languages -- never a good source of clear thinking in
deciding good style in an unrelated language!

As for the use-them, don't-use-them, who-cares, philosophy,
I find this a very sloppy view to the important issue of
coding style consistency.

>
> Frank
>
>


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