Re: [Q] Tools for Ada Quality and Style [LONG]

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

In article <dewar.831033677@schonberg>, Robert Dewar <dewar@cs.nyu.edu> wrote:
>...They are partially written up in
>an internal document, and could be further documented, although there is
>always the last epsilon where the style rules ultimately say "lay things
>out in an elegant style", where it is hard to pin down the last
>..details.

What we call "style" ranges from little formatting issues (like how many
spaces to put after a parenthesis), to vague rules like "use meaningful
variable names".  A person writing a novel wouldn't even consider the
first one to be called "style"; that person would call it "typography",
and, in most cases, would let some publisher worry about it.  For the
small, automatable issues, I'd rather have a tool that fixes it for me
silently, rather than complaining to me.

>It would be nice to have full documentation of the GNAT style. This is on
>the list of things to do.

Yes, it would be nice.  But my earlier post exagerated (I *said* I was
playing Devil's Advocate).  In practise, it's not so hard to pick up
most of the gnat style simply by reading the existing gnat sources.

- Bob