Re: wanted: Ada diff tool

[Brian Rogoff <bpr@shell5.ba.best.com>]

On Wed, 3 May 2000, Jean-Pierre Rosen wrote:
> On Adalog's component page (http://pro.wanadoo.fr/adalog/compo2.htm), you'll
> find a small utility called Normalize that processes an Ada source and
> removes comments, unnecessary spaces, and turns the whole text (except
> strings) upper-case. This is precisely intended to make a diff on the
> "semantic" part of the program. FWIW....
> 
> (I wrote this because of a lengthy discussion on this topic here some times
> ago. It turned out that it was faster to write the utility than to discuss
> about its desirability ;-)

I think this also relates to why C has to date been more successful than
Ada. Not enough Ada programmers have Jean-Pierre's excellent
code-first-ask-questions-later attitude. Bravo J-P, we need to clone a 
bunch more of you!

And yes, I'm entirely serious. "Hacking" seems to be a dirty word in the
Ada community, even though Ada is an outstanding language for hacking, as 
well as for large scale disciplined software engineering.

-- Brian