Re: Suggestion for gnatstub

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

"Marin David Condic" <mcondic.auntie.spam@acm.org> writes:

> Robert A Duff <bobduff@shell01.TheWorld.com> wrote in message
> news:wcc65v5maiv.fsf@shell01.TheWorld.com...
> >
> > To me, "null;" means "this procedure does nothing".  You're suggesting
> > to overload it to also mean "I haven't gotten around to writing this
> > procedure yet".
> >
> I can't think of too many other reasons to write a null procedure. If it was
> going to stay null forever, then why have it at all. Seems like the
> mechanism is there so you can have a procedure waiting for the programmer to
> find the elusive Round Tuit. :-)

I can't think of "too many", either, but I can think of some.  Just the
other day I wrote a generic procedure to walk a tree.  The generic takes
two generic formal procedures, Pre_Action and Post_Action, which are
called during the tree at the points you would guess.  They have
defaults, "is Do_Nothing", so you can specify one or the other.
Guess what procedure Do_Nothing looks like.  ;-)

> Well, everybody has different styles and sometimes its a matter of what is
> appropriate for the application at hand. Sometimes writing a bunch of test
> drivers is the way to go. Sometimes maybe one should just fill in all the
> code and get staarted testing the thing in one big gigantic thrust. But I
> think you can see that lots of things get built in iterative builds where
> some portion of the system remains as stubs to be filled in at a later time.

Just to be clear on what I was saying about my style (which I agree is
not everybody's style): I often test and debug one procedure in a
package before writing some other procedure in the same package.  For
that, I'd like the editor to insert compile-able but not runnable code.
But I don't usually debug one procedure while the procedures it calls
have not yet been written.

- Bob