Re: S-expression I/O in Ada

[Robert A Duff <bobduff@shell01.TheWorld.com>]

Natasha Kerensikova <lithiumcat@gmail.com> writes:

>...But this raises the question, what is the rationale for
> excluding some warning from -gnatwa?

They would generate too much noise for too many people.
But feel free to turn them on, and see if you like them.

> By the way, about style issues, do you all here really use the
> "standard" (or so it seems to me) indentation of 3 spaces for new blocs
> and 2 spaces for line continuations?

This is the AdaCore standard, not any official Ada standard.
I prefer 4 spaces, but since I work for AdaCore, of course
I use the AdaCore coding conventions.

> I find compiler issues to be the weakest point of Ada: documentation is
> pretty well hidden, ...

Heh?  Have you read the GNAT User's Guide, and the GNAT Reference
Manual?  They should be under some 'doc' directory in your
GNAT installation.  Or a quick google sends me to:

http://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/index.html#dir

How are these "well hidden"?

> function Root(From : in Container) return Cursor is
> begin
>    return Cursor'(Parent => null, Node => From.Root);
> end Root;

Nothing wrong with that.  I would probably write
"return (Parent => null, Node => From.Root);" in this case,
because the type is obvious by looking just two lines
previous.  But if you want to emphasize the type of
an expression, you can always qualify it as you did.

- Bob