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From: dewar@cs.nyu.edu (Robert Dewar)
Subject: Re: [Q] Tools for Ada Quality and Style
Date: 1996/05/04
Message-ID: <dewar.831268607@schonberg>#1/1
X-Deja-AN: 153074352
references: <4m6248$1as@dfw.dfw.net> <4mgfck$brm@newsbf02.news.aol.com>
organization: Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences
newsgroups: comp.lang.ada
Date: 1996-05-04T00:00:00+00:00
List-Id: <comp.lang.ada>


Lewis says

"Quality should be the issue, not style.  Style is only one
of the ingredients in a successful project.  In successful
projects requiring more than one programmer,  a strong team
leader is needed to communicate and to specify and enforce
standards of coding, style and prettyprint.  Programming is not
a democracy.   95% of programming is not creative, but hard
tedious work.  The goal is to create logic that works and is
maintainable."

Well consistent style is just one small though significant component
of quality.

In the GNAT project, we are actually quite democratic, we choose between
arbitrary possibilities (e.g. all upper case or mixed case identifiers,
or number of columns of indentation) by majority vote of the team. But
once that vote is taken, then it gets rigorously enforced and no 
deviations are allowed.

I think this *is* an important quality issue, since it is important to
avoid the phenomenon of individuals owning sections of code, and laying
claim to that ownership by using an idiosyncratic style -- I have seen
this happen frequently in large projects.