Re: Ada95 Pretty-Printers/Coding styles

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

Mats asks

<<> Furthermore, style is much more than a set of mechanical rules which can
> be enforced by an automaton, so you will never get realy consistent style
> (such as is achieved in the GNAT sources) by this approach.
 
If you have an internal style guide for GNAT code, I'd be interested in
reading it (unless it's a secret recipe, of course :-)>>

The style we use has three parts

a) mechanically enforced rules -- for these see the source files style.ads
and style.adb (which incidentally you can hack to make your own style rules
enforced).

b) rules that are pretty definite, but not enforced, and could be written
down, but never have been. Yes, it would be nice to write these down, but
it is not a high priority task for us.

c) rules that are quite vague, having to do with an aesthetic feeling of
which is the nicer way of doing things in a particular situation. These
cannot easily be written down, but they are a detectable part of the style
of code -- the sort of thing that can give clues as to who wrote the code.

What is remarkable at ACT is that we have a high degree of agreement between
ourselves even at level c). 

I have always looked over every checkin, and made stylistic corrections where
necessary for cases b) and c), and in the old days there were lots of
"minor reformatting" corrections from me, but these days, it is much rarer
for me to make (i.e. to need to make) such corrections, since we all now
have come to a common feel for how to be consistent with the group style.