[Ada Information Clearinghouse]

Ada '83 Quality and Style:

Guidelines for Professional Programmers

Copyright 1989, 1991,1992 Software Productivity Consortium, Inc., Herndon, Virginia.


CHAPTER 2: Source Code Presentation

The physical layout of source text on the page or screen has a strong effect on its readability. This chapter contains source code presentation guidelines intended to make the code more readable.

In addition to the general purpose guidelines, specific recommendations are made in the "instantiation" sections. If you disagree with the specific recommendations, you may want to adopt your own set of conventions that still follow the general purpose guidelines. Above all, be consistent across your entire project.

An entirely consistent layout is hard to achieve or check manually. Therefore you may prefer to automate layout with a tool for parameterized code formatting or incorporate the guidelines into an automatic coding template. Some of the guidelines and specific recommendations presented in this section cannot be enforced by a formatting tool because they are based on the semantics, not the syntax, of the Ada code. More details are given in the "automation notes" sections.

In this chapter...

2.1 Code Formatting
2.1.1 Horizontal Spacing
2.1.2 Indentation
2.1.3 Alignment of Operators
2.1.4 Alignment of Declarations
2.1.5 More on Alignment
2.1.6 Blank Lines
2.1.7 Pagination
2.1.8 Number of Statements Per Line
2.1.9 Source Code Line Length

Summary
code formatting

Back to document index