Re: Quick question about Ada code formatting.

[Simon Wright <simon@pushface.org>]

"Peter C. Chapin" <pchapin@sover.net> writes:

> I realize formatting style varies from person to person and from 
> organization to organization. Nevertheless some programming language 
> communities have definite community standards about how certain language 
> constructs should be formatted. For example, it seems universal in this 
> community to name variables This_Way.
>
> When it comes to calling subprograms I've seen some sources that put a 
> space between the name of the subprogram and the argument list.
>
>    My_Procedure (X, Y, Z);
>    A := My_Function (B);
>
> When wrapping such calls the entire argument list is moved down to the 
> next line.
>
>    My_Procedure
>       (Very_Long, Argument_List, With_Many, Arguments);
>
> In other communities (C/C++) it is more common to leave the space out 
> and also to leave the opening '(' on the same line as the procedure 
> name.
>
> I'm wondering how universal the above style is among Ada programmers. In 
> other words: would it be desirable for me to adopt it as part of my 
> personal style guide?
>
> Peter
>
> P.S. Is there an accepted indentation depth among Ada programmers? I've 
> seen three spaces in several places and I notice both Ada-mode in Emacs 
> and GPS use three spaces by default.

On my current project we decided to use the formatting provided by
GLIDE/GPS and to use the -gnaty switch to check it. You can give a
whole slew of options to -gnaty but it seems far easier to just accept
the defaults even if they aren't what you would be used to. The 3
space indent is a case in point; of course if your editor just does it
for you it's not so hard to accept!

What always baffles me is how people will *not* train themselves to do
what the style checker expects, and will *not* just fix the style
warnings as they go.