Re: AWS Coding Styles (and about boring plain-linear text files in the end)

["Dmitry A. Kazakov" <mailbox@dmitry-kazakov.de>]

On Wed, 19 Jan 2011 14:39:11 +0100, J-P. Rosen wrote:

> Le 19/01/2011 10:13, Dmitry A. Kazakov a �crit :
>>> And you want to read
>>> exactly what's written, not what your brain thinks is written!
>> 
>> Without brain thinking, you mean? (:-))
>> 
> I noticed the smiley, but kidding apart, I think it is very important to
> realize that you don't read what is written, but what you think is
> written.

Right, and it is always so. Perception is a part of the process of
thinking.

> How many times do you chase bugs that eventually resolved to
> modifying the wrong variable, and you read that damn assignment ten
> times before realizing it was the wrong variable ?!

Yes, because there is a mental model of the program is in the programmer's
head. The correspondence of this model to the reality expressed in the
language is never exact. Thinking and reading is necessary in order to
improve the correspondence.

I think that you meant a different thing: how well defined is the semantics
of the language being read. The semantics of the newspaper language is very
ill-defined, Ada is much better. But this is in no direct relation to
understanding of written texts in the above sense. Diffuse and
self-contradictory semantics can be easier to capture than the precise and
correct one, and conversely. Further, there is no obvious reason why the
process of reading should be different in both cases. I would say that it
is pretty same and that the quality of text is a thing quite unrelated to
its contents.

>> BTW, the argument to exactness works rather against you. Consider how texts
>> on mathematics are formatted. Formulae have always *shorter* lines than
>> plain texts, to be read "exactly."
> Hmmm... when you start having names that do not fit on one line, you
> really have a readability problem.

Sure, but we read different consequences from this. You believe that making
lines a bit longer would solve the problem. I do not.

>> Deeply nested constructs is IMO bad style, to be factored out
>> into local procedures.
>> 
> Of course, but if you consider named notation in subprogram calls (good
> programming practice certainly), where you want all arrows aligned (good
> presentation too), and a parameter is itself a function call, and you
> have some explicit long names, you end up quite easily close to the
> right margin.

Not really. In fact, keyed notation is horizontally shorter because:

   Draw_Value (Widget, 12.8 * Get_Current_Factor (Panel), ...);

is replaced with

   Draw_Value
   (  Widget => Widget,
      Value => 12.8 * Get_Current_Factor (Panel),
      ...
   );

-- 
Regards,
Dmitry A. Kazakov
http://www.dmitry-kazakov.de