Re: Gnat pretty printing

[Matthew Heaney <matthew_heaney@acm.org>]

Marin David Condic <condicma@bogon.pwfl.com> writes:

> I used to hate the dangling "(" too. But I've grown to like it. The
> reason is that sticking the "(" with the first parameter seems to upset
> the regularness of it all. Somehow, it makes the first parameter
> different from the rest and I never could tell if it made sense to line
> up the parameter names or just indent the same amount:
> 
> procedure Pop
>     (Item      :    out Element_Type ;
>     List       : in out List_Type) ;
> 
> vs
> 
> procedure Pop
>    (Item       :    out Element_Type ;
>     List       : in out List_Type) ;
> 
> Either way, it just didn't seem comfortable - so I learned to like the
> dangling "(".
> 
> I'm sure we are touching off a religious war here. I will no doubt get
> dozens of people out there foaming at the mouth over just how morally
> evil the dangling "(" is. Oh well. I doubt if we could ever get the
> whole world to agree on a formatting standard in all its details. Maybe
> we just have to have enough of a consensus over the bigger things such
> that Ada code has enough regularity to it to be easily recognizable.
> (The character case debate seems to have been mostly settled, so maybe
> there's hope for parameter lists?)


If you use ada-mode with emacs, then this is a non-issue.  The open
paren goes where you expect it (see below), and it can format the entire
parameter list (C-c C-f), even getting rid of that nasty space that
preceeds the semicolons.  

procedure Pop
  (Item :    out Element_Type;
   List : in out List_Type);


I live by these words:

"Get a life.  Get emacs."  

Life is good...