Automatic styling of Ada code?

General
1

My experimental Ada program now consists of almost 30.000 lines and is becoming less of a personal playgroud. Before release I should transform it according to a well known/common style guide. Any hint about how to do this in a quick way - something more than the simplest code formatters and beautifiers?

reinert

2

I use gnatformat --no-subprojects --charset=utf8 (or alr exec -- gnatformat --no-subprojects --charset=utf8 with alire).

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3

In addition, you can also add a package inside your GPR to configure gnatformat, ex:

project Amazing_Thing is
  -- you config

   package Format is
      for Width ("Ada") use "119"; -- Max char per line
      for Charset ("Ada") use "utf-8"; -- default encoding
   end Format;
end Amazing_Thing;

You can refer to the official documentation for more details.

Furthermore, you can define a pre-commit hook to format the code automatically before committing. In VS-Code you can also configure Format-On-Save. For GNAT Studio, I don’t know.

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4

Is there a way to default to --no-subprojects? I didn’t find how to do that in the documentation.

That default choice is quite weird as it tries to format all withed libraries living their own life outside the project. I don’t care if VSS (or others) don’t follow gnatformat rules, as it’s not my code…

5

Good question, I don’t know.

On my side, I use a pre-commit script that does this: alr exec -- gnatformat -P My_Project.gpr
It does not format Alire dependencies.

Unfortunately, there is no 1:1 flag configuration…

6

Thanks, adding the project as argument works. I don’t know why I expected the same behaviour without the argument. Maybe it seemed logical within an alire crate to only format the current crate and not the dependencies…

7

I set format file as keyboard and mouse button shortcuts in preferences.

8

J.P. Rosen is with a company called AdaLog, and they provide a utility for checking Ada rules (very customizable), and I think that there’s a formatter, or at least formatting checker: AdaControl.

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9

J.P. Rosen was my N+1, and he is my company’s PhD supervisor. I work for Novasys Ingénierie, where AdaLog is a subsidiary.

Yes, in AdaControl, we have a few “formatting” rules (called Style): AdaControl User Guide > Style
It is possible to apply auto-fix, which acts as gnatformat. BUT, AdaControl is firstly a coding rule verification tool, not a formatter. So it is not as convenient as gnatformat for formatting.

Furthermore, due to ASIS-4-GNAT end-of-life, AdaControl only supports Ada up to Ada 2012.