A Lesson from the Ada Era: How a 1980s IR Solved Modern Linter Problems
By
MaxLeiter
Hand-rolled, kettle-boiled, baked to perfection. Worth every minute at the bakery.
Summary
A personal anecdote about a high school computer science teacher, Mr. Paige, who worked on the Ada compiler and had been programming since the early 1980s. The author recalls complaining about linter tooling in 2016, only to learn from Mr. Paige that the problem had already been solved decades earlier when they used an Intermediate Representation (IR) called DIANA instead of storing text sources, allowing everyone to have their own pretty-printing settings.
Key quotes
· 5 pulledI 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 want
and we knew this back in the 80s
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