Re: need help learning Ada for a modula-2 programmer

["Randy Brukardt" <randy@rrsoftware.com>]

"Pascal Obry" <pascal@obry.net> wrote in message 
news:1391099324.30150.70.camel@pascal.home.net...
...
>And why should a developer have to duplicate information about what has
>been done when it is recorded into the VCS?

(1) Because the VCS only contains a summary of what was done, the details 
are only in the source code. A lot of my VCS entries look like "Fixed bug 
14-06" which doesn't tell you much.
(2) Because the VCS is a separate program, meaning you have to find that 
program, bring it to the top, and then pull up the VCS information in 
question. It's usually easier to find the change log in the source file.
(3) Because the change comment should be local to the change (although I 
don't do this consistently for historical reasons); it makes a lot more 
sense when it is directly next to the code that is affected.
(4) Because sooner or later the source code is going to be separated from 
the VCS (via download, customer delivery, tools change, etc.), and the 
change information will be lost or inaccessible.

I probably could come up with plenty of additional reasons if I wanted too. 
My philosophy is that *everything* about a program ought to be embodied in 
the Ada source files. It shouldn't be necessary to use anything else to 
build an Ada program. (Not project files, not batch scripts, nor anything 
other than you compiler's "Make" tool). I admit that we're not quite there, 
but on modern machines most of these other artifacts are unnecessary. (It 
only takes 20 minutes to recompile the entire Janus/Ada compiler. Most of 
these other things are from an era when it took 12 hours to recompile the 
compiler - saving compilation time by organization was much more important. 
We really don't need to do that now.)

                              Randy.