Re: Ada95 Pretty-Printers/Coding styles

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

Jeff said

<<Looking at the Ada-ASSURED web page from your perspective I can see how
it  might sound a little heavy handed on the "enforcement" side and
doesn't say enough about how it automates formatting and style.  I will
keep this in mind as we update our web site this summer.
>>

However, one conclusion from our discussions was that the kind of processing
that Ada-ASSURED can do is not sufficient for our purposes. In particular,
two of the checks which we consider essential (separate specs required
for all subprograms, and spelling of identifiers required to be consistent
with the matching declaration) seem beyond its reach.

It is for this sort of check (we have in mind a number of similar semantic
checks), that it seems more effective to embed a formatting tool into the
compiler, or, perhaps as an alternative, build an ASIS-based tool for
performing the checking.

Of course this does not give you on the fly editing assistance. Some people
like this, and indeed the Ada modfe we supply for EMACS precisely does those
simple syntactically driven formatting rules automatically, but currently
does not go further than this (although interestingly, EMANCS is hooked into
the gnatf xref output, and using this interface, it is not impossible to do
some of the semantic checking, certyainly the above two rules are in reach).

Jeff you never really confirmed that the two cases above are ones that
Ada-ASSURED could not handle. At first you said that the identifier

consistency case could be handled, but I think this was based on a 
misundestanding that I was talking simply about enforcing a consistent
casing style, and I was talking about something quite different.

Robert