Re: DOM and SAX parsing in Ada

[Nick Roberts <nick.roberts@acm.org>]

Stephen Leake <stephen_leake@acm.org> wrote:

> > So, I could see very little advantage to making any contributions to
> > XML/Ada, since it would create two XML/Adas (mine and AdaCore's). Would
> > that be an advantage to the Ada community?
> 
> Big disconnect. Why do you say there would be two? Hmm, apparently you
> feel you can only contribute if the CVS repository is on SourceForge. Why
> is that, specifically?

I told the AdaCore employee that I wanted to make a large number of small
changes (a lot of comments that would help identify fragments of code, for
referential maintenance documentation), and he responded that he felt such
changes were not necessary. I took this to imply (although admittedly he
didn't say so explicitly) that he wouldn't accept these changes into the
AdaCore CVS repository. On this basis, I was assuming that I would have to
create a forked project on some other repository (of course it doesn't have
to be SourceForge per se).

> > On the subject of comments, I suggested that the amount of maintenance
> > documention (in the form of comments or in any other form) was
> > insufficient -- it was nearly nonexistent, in fact -- and the answer
> > was, in essence, that no maintenance documentation is required, since
> > the code is self-documenting. I'm afraid, to me, that attitude is
> > unacceptable (and doesn't seem very professional, frankly).
> 
> Well, did you try reading the code? THat is the only thing that matters,
> not some arbitrary standard of "not enough comment lines". If you can, in
> fact, understand it, then it _is_ self-documenting.

Of course I read the code, Stephen!  In the package bodies there are almost
no comments at all, and there is no other maintenance documentation. The
code is very complex, and no vaguely self-documenting. The idea that it
could be struck me (and still strikes me) as, frankly, bizarre.

> On the other hand, I agree that a lot of AdaCore's code is not well enough
> documented; I'm thinking of some parts of GtkAda in particular.

Well, that would seem to be a case in point, then.

> But the proper response is to contribute good documentation, not just
> complain.

I wanted to do precisely that!  I specifically offered to contribute
maintenance documentation, but this offer seemed to be rejected, in effect,
by the AdaCore employee I communicated with.

-- 
Nick Roberts