Re: Quick question about Ada code formatting.

["Randy Brukardt" <randy@rrsoftware.com>]

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"Pascal Obry" <pascal@obry.net> wrote in message
news:43F872C4.50505@obry.net...
> Georg Bauhaus a �crit :
>
> > They can indicate a major block. For example in Matt's AI 302
> > implementation, there are blank lines between many executable
> > statements. There are two blank lines between most, if not all,
> > subprograms.
>
> Between subprograms I prefer the "GNAT style" header box:
>
>   ----------------------
>   -- Process_Whatever --
>   ----------------------
>
>   procedure Process_Whatever is
>   ...
>
> Far clearer than 2 blank lines IMHO.

But extremely hard to maintain. We used a style like that in the Janus/Ada
compiler, and we found that we were spending a lot of time lining up the
closing hyphens ever time the comment changed in some way. We abandoned the
whole idea with Claw, and went to two blank lines between subprograms.

After all, the idea isn't to carry any information, but to simply to
separate the procedures. (Comments that repeat what is obviously known by
reading the source code are evil, IMHO, so I find this comment wasteful.)
Perhaps a better approach would be to include a dashed line separator
between procedures -- but that takes *three* lines, and since you never have
enough screen real estate, so it seems like a waste.

                        Randy.