Re: Bad coding standards

["Ken Garlington" <Ken.Garlington@computer.org>]

"Marin David Condic" <mcondic.nospam@acm.org> wrote in message
news:3A3F8E88.317C9FDB@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.

My recommendation is to fire the auditors -- or at least, pull the rotten
teeth. Worked for us.