Re: good software engineering (was: mixing integer and logical ops)

[eachus@mitre-bedford.arpa (Robert I. Eachus)]

In article <27MAY199312323696@bambam.gsfc.nasa.gov> nbssal@bambam.gsfc.nasa.gov
 (Stephe Leake) writes:

   Wes Groleau writes...
   >>     I've always thought that one of the major advantages of Ada was
   >>that it makes bad code look so bad that the author fixes it, often
   >>before anyone else sees it.
   > 

   Robert I. Eachus writes:
   >I think the reason is not that Ada makes it easier to spot "bad code"
   >Rather, IMHO, it's that the "Ada community" has from the beginning
   >had an attitude in favor of "pretty" and readable source code...  The
   >C community on the other hand is unsuccessfully trying to change a
   >culture that EXPECTS code to be unreadable.

   Whoops!  The attributions are backwards!

   Stephen Leake said:

  > I'll go with Wes; I've always found that if Ada makes me work to
  > hard to do what I think I want to do, there is usually a better
  > way, or I don't really want to do it. Put another way, if you find
  > yourself writing inelegant Ada code, take a step back and think the
  > problem thru again. Maybe peruse the LRM; some feature of Ada that
  > you had temporarily forgotten about might jump and suggest a better
  > approach.

  So I think Stephen is trying to agree with me here.  However, Wes's
position is fairly close to mine, so I'm not 100% sure.  This is
starting to remind me of the nature vs. nurture argument, or maybe the
chicken and the egg...

--

					Robert I. Eachus

with Standard_Disclaimer;
use  Standard_Disclaimer;
function Message (Text: in Clever_Ideas) return Better_Ideas is...