Re: Bad coding standards

["Ken Garlington" <Ken.Garlington@computer.org>]

"Wayne Lydecker" <wayne@mtws.visicom.com> wrote in message
news:3A3A8272.30052FAD@mtws.visicom.com...
: "Charles H. Sampson" wrote:
: >
: > David Emery <emery@mitre.org> wrote:
: >
: >      Actually, I find this an acceptable compromise between my preferred
: > style of using the use clause and the usual style of requiring fully
: > qualified names.  For me, qualifying everything with package names in-
: > troduces a tremendous amount of clutter, particularly if the package
: > names are long, for the occasional payoff when looking up the name is
: > necessary.  Using the two- or three-letter rename at least reduces that
: > clutter to manageable proportions.  If the abbreviations have some dis-
: > tinguishing characteristic, such as being all upper case, then your eye
: > can skip across them quite easily.  Standard, project-wide, renames are
: > helpful too, but that might not be practical in monstrous projects that
: > have hundreds of packages.
: >
: >      I don't understand the point of the rename in the package specifi-
: > cation.
: >
: >                                 Charlie
: >
: > --
: >      To get my correct email address, replace the "claveman" by
: > "csampson" in my fake (anti-spam) address.
:
: What we do at our company is make renames for each operator that we
: need to import. e.g. (pulled randomly from our code):
:
:   function "*"(L:Measurements.Distance_Type; R:Measurements.Distance_Type)
:     return Measurements.Distance_Type renames Measurements."*";
:
: That way we can use the "*" inline without the messy syntax.  For
: instance, we can write:
:
:   A := B * C;
:
: instead of:
:
:   A := Measurements."*"(A, B);
:
: For complex statements, the renames really help.

If you're using Ada 95, you should definitely consider "use type" as an
alternative. Renaming a set of operators has proven to be so error-prone in
my experience, with the error so unlikely to be detected until run-time,
that I hope no one uses this routinely!

:  As far as the TLAs
: (three letter acronyms), we used to do that all over our code.  Things
: got so bad though that we had to use acronyms that didn't even match
: what we were trying to rename because it was already taken by another
: renamed package.  What would be nifty would be to allow a package spec
: define its own "approved" renames of the package that other packages
: would be allowed to use.  I'm sure I'll hear immediately why it's not
: a good idea though ;-)
:
: -- Wayne.