Re: ACM Ada Letters

[Georg Bauhaus <sb463ba@l1-hrz.uni-duisburg.de>]

Marin David Condic <nobody@noplace.com> wrote:
: Sure, I could always get some form of formatting for publication. Either 
: A) I laboriously translate my Ada code via a word processor and tab 
: stops and whatever else I may need or

(A) shouldn't have to be done when there is a parser for Ada :-)
Indeed with GNAT you can use -gnatt, to some extent, this could
be a starting point.

: B) I laboriously write a program 
: to reformat it into Postscript or something else that can be sucked up 
: by some publishing tool while preserving my monospace alignment. (Still 
: doesn't solve the problem of possibly wanting to make things align 
: within identifiers, but perhaps that is not really necessary.)

No, no, no, the alignment can be done (not overriden) by the
formatting program, either by respecting the space character count,
or by using an alignment algorithm using whatever fonts you have
chosen!  You type plain characters.  The PP program is Ada-aware,
and configurable.  The PP program makes sure that there is alignment,
if and how you want it.  No tabbing needed, no changes or additions
to source code, leave that to the computer :-)

So there is no need for: 

: The question is "How do I get that within my Ada code such that its 
: still a compilable thing and is represented consistently by various 
: IDEs?" I thought the idea was to have proportional fonts as part of the 
: programming ritual and the objection was that monospace fonts make it 
: easy to format code. If its handled all through the editor via some 
: algorithm, it probably won't look the same across editors.

Imagine you want to rename on identifier, possibly changing its
length in characters. With just "space character formatting"
you get into the usual typewriter-style trouble. With a computer
program to assist you if you want, in whatever stage, you don't
have to think about formatting when you write or change code.

Reminds me of the widespread use of spaces, tabs, and pressing
RETURN in place of using paragraph styles, automatic indenation,
automatic or forced page breaking, automatic keep-together features,
etc. that typesetting software and word processors have had for
some time know...


Georg