Re: Ada standard and maximum line lengths

[Adam Beneschan <adam@irvine.com>]

On Tuesday, January 29, 2013 10:46:36 AM UTC-8, Lucretia wrote:

> So, in short, I'm wondering whether it really matters to parse by breaking up into lines or not.

If every source input that your program will get is a valid Ada program, then there's probably no need to "break up" the source into lines.  But if there are errors, then it can be useful for the program to at least be aware of where lines begin and end--possibly for error reporting (so that you can display a line number and maybe the whole input line), and if you want to get really fancy, the program might be able to look at the indentation of a line to make an educated guess about what the programmer intended, when there's a missing "end" or something like that, which sometimes can help reduce the number of cascading error messages.  It depends on what you want your program to do.  But it's probably important to think about how your program will handle errors in the input; and that's something that should be considered right away in the design process, not as an afterthought.

I don't know if this answers your question.  Making sure the program is aware of where a line is isn't the same as "breaking up" into lines, but the term "breaking up" isn't really well defined.  However, if you're thinking about writing a lexical scanning or parsing subroutine that takes one line of input as a parameter, I don't see any advantage in that.

                             -- Adam