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

[stt@henning.camb.inmet.com (Tucker Taft)]

Bob Duff and Norm Cohen wrote:

[lot's of reasonable stuff about good and bad verbosity]

Be that as it may...

I find the easiest way to deal with extra, seemingly unnecessary,
levels of constructs is to "half" indent.

E.g.:

    if A > 0 then
      declare
        B : Integer := A;
      begin
        -- This is my normal indent of 4
        A := B * A;
      end;
    else
        A := 2;
    end if;

Another alternative is to "merge" constructs, e.g.:

    if A > 0 then declare
        B : Integer := A;
    begin
        -- This is my normal indent of 4
        A := B * A;
    end; else
        A := 2;
    end if;

Neither of these win the beauty award, but somehow not having to
indent so far makes the extra level of construct sufficiently
less painful that the pain doesn't overwhelm the gain.

In any case, if our biggest problem with Ada 95 is that it requires 
an explicit "declare" to introduce very local variables, I'm content...

-Tucker Taft   stt@inmet.com   http://www.inmet.com/~stt/
Intermetrics, Inc.  Cambridge, MA  USA