RE: Bad coding standards - aesthetics are irrelevant

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

From: Bob Leif
To: Singlespeeder et al.

A direct way to enforce an institutional style would be to build automated
tools that reformat the Ada source to beautiful Ada source. For instance, if
an XML schema were created for Ada, it appears to me that it would be
possible to create an ASIS based tool to produce Ada source in XML syntax.
It should then be possible, if need be, to enhance an XML editor to serve as
an Ada programming editor. Since the formatting of XML is separate from the
XML document, it should be possible to create an institutional style sheet.
This technology could be augmented by other ASIS tools which, for instance,
could selectively eliminate Use Package statements and instead perform
renames according to a standard algorithm.


-----Original Message-----
From: comp.lang.ada-admin@ada.eu.org
[mailto:comp.lang.ada-admin@ada.eu.org]On Behalf Of Singlespeeder
Sent: Wednesday, December 20, 2000 2:23 PM
To: comp.lang.ada@ada.eu.org
Subject: Re: Bad coding standards - aesthetics are irrelevant


Much of the debate on aesthetics would be needless if there was a good
freely available non-proprietary tool for reformatting the code, much like
the C world has 'indent'.

Then all you do is specify a company wide set of flags for the tool and
insist that all code is run through the tool with those flags before
checking it into the code libraries.

This is not a new idea - check out 'Code Complete' by Steve McConnell for
more debate on layout backed up by hard figures.

Unfortunately bad coding style is more than mere aesthetics.

As for markers in the code - surely the language standard itself need not
specify them. Neither is there any reason why you or your company couldn't
adopt html (or even xml) in your source code comments and then run the
source through a tool similar to javadoc. Except you'd have to write the
tool. None proprietary please.

Nick Wallis