RE: Bad coding standards

["Robert C. Leif, Ph.D." <rleif@rleif.com>]

From: Bob Leif
To: Robert Dewar et al.

"but in a decent system where this information is immediately at hand I
see no possible advantage in this kind of redundancy."
1) I was not using GNAT when I did this. 2)I have no guarantee that for
every place my source text is used that the above facilities will be
available. and 3) I do this mostly for package renames.

Very often, I will rename a subprogram from a withed package or a parent
library in a specification or body. However, that is almost entirely to make
it more readable in its present context.

A simple, portable solution would be to employ XML for the Ada source text
and include hypertext links to the withed packages and their components. I
see a good beginning of this with the present work on Ada to HTML. The
combination of XML and ASIS will provide a very large advantage for the
creation of Ada environments and tool-sets. The use of XML provides the
interesting possibility of including a time-stamp attribute in each XML
block. This might permit the development of an incremental compiler.

-----Original Message-----
From: comp.lang.ada-admin@ada.eu.org
[mailto:comp.lang.ada-admin@ada.eu.org]On Behalf Of Robert Dewar
Sent: Friday, December 15, 2000 5:19 PM
To: comp.lang.ada@ada.eu.org
Subject: RE: Bad coding standards


In article
<NBBBJNOMKDIAJALCEFIJKECIEBAA.rleif@rleif.com>,
  comp.lang.ada@ada.eu.org wrote:
> --*********Table of Contents********
> Package Analyze_Type_Declaration renames
>   Semantics_For_RM_Ch_3.Analyze_Type_Declaration;
> --*********End Table of Contents********
> --I presumed Analyze_Type_Declaration was a package

This kind of garbage renaming might I suppose be
useful in a system where you have trouble telling
where an entity resides, but in a decent system
where this information is immediately at hand I
see no possible advantage in this kind of redundancy.
In particular, repeating parameters of procedures
in every unit using the procedure seems particularly
ugly to me. Imagine the impact if you added a default
parameter!


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