Re: Ada Code Formatting (Ada source diff)

[dewar@cs.nyu.edu (Robert Dewar)]

Franco Mazzanti said:

"This, actually, could be seen as a feature, when it documented inside the
script, rather then a bug.

Is there any other really meaningful difference which is lost, (apart from
not distinguing the literals 01, 001, 0001, 2#1#, 4#1#, and similars)?"

The point is that there is no reliable answer to this question. The only
guarantee on -gnatdo (-do in gnatf) is that the output is equivalent 
semanmtically to the original source. Note that this is more than just
a debugging feature, since this same circuit is used for distribution
stub generation, so it is certainly not going away, and I agree that
from one point of view the normalization done by -gnato could be
seen as a feature. Another case is large numbers of parens result in
paren layers being ignored, e.g. (((((((b))))))) is the same as (((b))).
There many be others, I simply don't know since there is no requirement
to think about this or document it!