October, 2004

<flame>
I've been writing software for about 30 years. I sort of have this mental model that a compiler reads your source file and writes object modules. It's been a good model. I've never seen it contradicted. Until now.

It turns out that just reading your source is not good enough for the Rational Apex Ada compiler. No.... it wants to pretty print it and write it back as well. So you point the compiler at some nicely checked out modules and *WHAM* your entire source tree is modified. That's so way fscking convenient I don't know how I lived without it all these years. </flame>