Re: How many of you have Ada programming careers?

[Nick Gordon <nicholas.gordon@operamail.com>]

Dennis Lee Bieber <wlfraed@ix.netcom.com> wrote:
>         Since many of us have been trained to "pretty-print" (ie; use
> indentation to indicate block structure), requiring {} begin/end etc. are
> superfluous to the design of the code. {} are difficult to see -- and
> difficult to match up in some coding styles -- personally the convention of
> 
> if (cond) {
>         <statements>
> } else {
>         <statements>
> }
> 
> is completely confusing... If delimiters are needed, I want them to align
> on the same column so I can use a straight-edge to find the blocks...
> 
> if (cond)
> {
>         <statements>
> }
> else
> {
>         <statements>
> }
> 
>         Those languages using {} are even more problematic as the {} are
> typically NOT required if <statements> is only a single statement, not a
> block... That leads to things like
> 
> if (cond)
>         <statement>
> else
> {
>         <statements>
> }
> 
> At least Ada uses self blocking keywords, not line-noise, and the keywords
> are not optional.
> 

You know before now I've exclusively written it in the:
if () {
} else }
}

style, because I felt that made more readable code chunks, but your explanation
of why:
if ()
{
}
else
{
}

is better suddenly makes a *lot* more sense. I think we can both agree though
that people that do this:
if () { }
else { }

are terrible humans.

Nick