[Info-vax] Fortran

[Arne Vajhøj]

On 12/7/2018 4:53 PM, Stephen Hoffman wrote:
> On 2018-12-07 17:05:36 +0000, Dave Froble said:
>> Coding style can have a lot to do with understand code.
> 
> Some of the recent efforts around automated refactoring work 
> surprisingly well, and source code formatters are a common feature of 
> development tools.  The vendor tools for source code development on 
> OpenVMS are lacking here, unfortunately.

>> I once ran across some code that had been added to some of my 
>> programs.   I had to believe that it was deliberately formatted to be 
>> as unreadable as possible.  Just a mass of characters, all run 
>> together, no CR and such.  A compiler could read it, a human really 
>> could not.
> 
> I've seen blocks of character blobbage arising secondary to 
> record-formatting and line-wrappage differences.  Various of the OpenVMS 
> sequential file formats aren't known for portability.
> 
> Source code formatters are a common solution here, and I've routinely 
> recommended embedding a source code formatter into the check-in hooks in 
> the local source code control system.
> 
> By contemporary standards, BASIC and most other OpenVMS languages lack 
> development environment and development tool support.  Including 
> formatting.  Last I checked, LSEDIT lacks this capability.

Code formatting to a coding convention that an be defined in the
IDE is nice.

Both for normal use and for cleaning up some real bad code.

One just need to accept that using a code formatter to clean
up some real bad code will show up as a lot of changed lines
in all types of diffs and statistics.

Arne