Formatting code should be unnecessary

Formatting code should be unnecessary

and we knew this back in the 80s

I had a (maybe slightly overqualified) computer science teacher back in highschool, Mr. Paige. He worked on the Ada compiler and has been programming since the early 80s.

One day I complained about linter tooling that was driving me nuts. I said something to the effect of, "it's 2016, how are we still dealing with this sort of thing?"

Turns out, that problem was solved four decades ago (well, three at that point). Back when he was working on Ada, they didn't store text sources at all — they used an IR called DIANA. Everyone had their own pretty-printing settings for viewing it however they wanted.

We've been debating some linter settings at work recently and I keep thinking back to Mr. Paige. It's 2025, how are we still dealing with this sort of thing?

Well, to answer that it would help to know what we're missing.

I believe he was working with the Rational R1000, of which there isn't a ton of info (like all things Ada, it was used by the DoD):

The R1000 had a lot of bleeding-edge features: incremental compilation, semantic analysis, version control, and first-class debugging all built-in. It was a workstation similar to the Xerox Alto but using Ada instead of Smalltalk.

Fun Fact: The R1000 is fairly undocumented and very rare, but it was used in the writing of software for the ISS, the F-22, presumably countless other government projects, and led to the birth of UML by Grady Booch.

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