Re: Ada Code Formatting

[kst@thomsoft.com (Keith Thompson)]

In <dewar.839723478@schonberg> dewar@cs.nyu.edu (Robert Dewar) writes:
[...]
> A useful utility would be an Ada specific diff, with an option to ignore
> white space, ignore line changes, ignore reformatting of comments, or
> igore comments completely.
> 
> (it could even consider ABC and abc to be the same optionally, or
> 10 and 2#1010#)
> 
> So there's a nice little project for someone in an enthusiastic mood!

A simpler, and nearly as useful, utility would translate its Ada input
into individual tokens and print them one per line.  So, for example,
this input:

    with Text_IO;
    procedure Hello is -- a comment
    begin
	Text_IO.Put_Line("Hello");
    end Hello;

would yield this output:

    with
    text_io
    ;
    procedure
    hello
    is
    begin
    text_io
    .
    put_line
    (
    "Hello"
    )
    ;
    end
    hello
    ;

You could then run two versions of an Ada source through this relatively
simple filter and compare the outputs.  If they compare equal, there is
no semantically significant difference between the original sources.
If they don't, finding where in the original sources the differences
occur is left as an exercise.

-- 
Keith Thompson (The_Other_Keith) kst@thomsoft.com <*>
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