Re: some questions re. Ada/GNAT from a C++/GCC user

[bobduff@world.std.com (Robert A Duff)]

In article <adaworksDp5Ct8.1wt@netcom.com>,
AdaWorks <adaworks@netcom.com> wrote:
>  Surely you inadvertantly omitted your smiley for the phrase, "for no
>  good reason."

No, I'm absolutely serious.  No joke.  I really do think the extra
verbosity damages readability, and there's "no good reason" for it.
Don't get me wrong -- I don't think is really a big deal.

Another point: The extra verbosity also encourages people to declare
things up at the top of the procedure, rather than at the innermost
statement list in which they're used.  For example, I believe I saw a
post from Norman Cohen a while back, saying that (in some particular
example), the extra verbosity of declare/begin/end just isn't worth it.
That's sad, because when you move the thing up to the top, you make the
declaration harder to understand:

    - Its scope is larger, so to see how it's used, you have to read
      more code.

    - In many cases, the initial value of the variable is not known at
      the top of the procedure -- it's something that gets calculated
      along the way.  So you have to initialize it with an assignment
      statement.  That's bad, because it becomes harder to understand
      whether the variable is properly initialized.

    - In many cases, making the scope bigger than it needs to be causes
      the object to be a variable, rather than a constant.  Constants
      are easier to understand than variables.

So here's a case where trying to FORCE people to write good code
backfires.  Norm Cohen is not some evil doer who revels in terse, arcane
notations!

- Bob