Re: Bad coding standards

["Ken Garlington" <Ken.Garlington@computer.org>]

"Robert Dewar" <robert_dewar@my-deja.com> wrote in message
news:91agll$kup$1@nnrp1.deja.com...
: In article <131220001555268634%emery@mitre.org>,
:   David Emery <emery@mitre.org> wrote:
: > For a while, I collected coding standards as a
: > hobby.  I've seen some dumb ideas, but here's my
: > nomination for worst idea:
: >
: >    package Long_Descriptive_Name is
: >
: >       package LDN renames Long_Descriptive_Name
:
: Interesting .. this does not seem so horrible to me.

I think the key is in Mr. Emery's later statement, that there wasn't a
common acronym list used to derive or track these abbreviations. Given that
the project didn't have a decent code navigation tool (also implied by his
description), I could see where this could be annoying  (although hardly the
worst idea...)

My vote for "worst idea" came from a development team who was transitioning
from the JOVIAL language to Ada. In JOVIAL, you could list all imported
items at the top of the routine. The team thought it would be great to do
this in Ada as well, so all over the place you got stuff like:

with Some_Package;
procedure Some_Procedure is

  subtype Some_Type is Some_Package.Some_Type;

  function "+" (Left, Right: Some_Type) return Some_Type renames
Some_Package."+";

  function "-" (Left, Right: Some_Type) return Some_Type renames
Some_Package."+";

  A: Some_Type renames Some_Package.A;

...

This was miserable for several reasons: (1) It didn't always work (e.g. if
the same name were used in different packages); (2) It completely cluttered
the top of all declarative units, making it very easy to miss important
declarations or comments; (3) It made it very easy to introduce subtle
errors that often could not be caught until run-time testing (see the "-"
renaming for an example), and (4) the extra complexity made it more likely
for our early Ada compilers to crash.

We did eventually get the code to work, though.