Re: Ada standard and maximum line lengths

[Niklas Holsti <niklas.holsti@tidorum.invalid>]

On 13-01-28 08:28 , Jeffrey Carter wrote:
> On 01/27/2013 10:02 PM, Lucretia wrote:
>>
>> I was reading the Ada 2012 standard and found this, I was just
>> wondering why
>> there is a maximum line length, it's not like we parse the language a
>> line at
>> a time. Why not just accept it as a stream of tokens and if there are
>> line
>> breaks, ignore?
> 
> I presume that by "this", you're referring to ARM 2.2, where it says:
> 
> "An implementation shall support lines of at least 200 characters in
> length, not counting any characters used to signify the end of a line.
> An implementation shall support lexical elements of at least 200
> characters in length. The maximum supported line length and lexical
> element length are implementation defined."
> 
> This does not impose a maximum line length; it imposes a minimum value
> for the maximum line length a compiler must accept. An implementation is
> free to accept lines of any length greater than this minimum length that
> it chooses, including no maximum line length.

Yes.

> But since the maximum line
> length chosen by a compiler also defines the maximum identifier length
> accepted by the compiler,

Why? I don't see anything in the ARM quote that requires this. The
limits on the line length and lexical element length are independent,
although they minimum happen to have the same minimum value.

A compiler could have 200 characters as the maximum lexical element and
identifier length, but accept lines of any length, couldn't it?

-- 
Niklas Holsti
Tidorum Ltd
niklas holsti tidorum fi
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