Re: [orbitcpp-list] idl compiler has arrived

[Andreas K. <ak...@ix...>]

Hi Braden,

"Braden N. McDaniel" wrote:
> 
> I've been kinda eyeballing this project for a while, lurking. I'd like to
> participate, but my current project load really won't accommodate it. As a
> non-participant, I realize my comments on these issues might well be
> dismissed, and I can't say I'd blame you terribly for doing just that. But
> if you'll humor me, and entertain the viewpoint of a *potential*
> contributor...

Good to hear.

> Please don't use tabs. Quite contrary to the claim here, they *don't*
> scale well. When you indent code at a particular tab width, it isn't
> particularly likely that things will continue to line up well using
> a different tab width. Furthermore, I don't want to have to reconfigure my
> editor just to make someone else's code readable.

i'd like to object that. after struggling with my emacs config for about
half an hour yesterday, i found out how well tabs _do_ scale. The
freshly indented thing looked consistent with tab-width=4,2 and even 8.
(though not too pretty at 8 because of its level of nesting) 

could you give an example of a situation where tabs become a "BAD THING"
(tm)?

> 
> Spaces offer consistency. The more aggressive indentation requirements of
> C++ (relative to C) make a large indentation level impractical--IME, 2 or
> 4 spaces work adequately.

tabs offer the right to choose.

> It seems to me that for a project like this it just makes a Whole Lot Of
> Sense to use the same naming convention as the C++ binding to CORBA. I've
> found that I can adjust to just about any naming convention after staring
> at it long enough, but consistency is *important*.

yes it is, but one needn't interpret this so stiffly. With the CORBA
spec naming convention on the one side and some other convention on our
side (which would never be visible to an outside user of the package, of
course) it would be extremely easy to determine from the code which is
implementation detail and which is outside interface. Likewise, the
compiler is almost completely disjoint from any corba spec namespace, so
there's well some space to choose. phil?

> Now, that said, in case I have some time coming up (I might), are there
> any relatively small, well defined tasks that would be well-suited to
> someone getting his feet wet with this project?

after we got the compiler and the runtime reasonably lined up, adding a
new type or implementing some specific ORB or POA feature might be such
a job.

cya
andy