Question

Is it possible to write your own gnatcheck rules, and if so, can someone point me to a good reference? I am searching for a particular “style” that is being used, and would love if I could simply write a rule that says if you see said style, it will throw up a warning, or an error, this way we can flag when this isn’t following a particular standard.

Answer 1

A bit of background may be helpful here. While the style checks hold out a lot of promise for enforcing user style guidelines, that isn’t exactly what they are for.

The main purpose of those checks is to enforce Ada Core‘s (The folks who maintain the compiler) style on the sources of the Ada compiler itself. You may notice that the checks get automatically turned on if you try compiling one of the compiler’s own source files.

It doesn’t really serve AdaCore’s purposes at all if the styles enforced by the checks themselves are user-configurable, so they added no feature like that.

Your first option if you want to use it yourself is to just stick to AdaCore’s coding style. I haven’t found it horrible in the past, so you may just look at doing that.

Still, making some kind of configurability would be a really cool feature for somebody to add. If you go this route, you probably would have to make it configurable (with the current behavior as the default), rather than just changing the checks. The reason is that you’d have to modify the compiler sources to accomplish this, and as I mentioned above, the compiler turns the checks on when compiling itself. You really don’t want to have to reformat a ton of working Gnat compiler source files.

I’d really like to see someone do this at some point, as it would make the checks much more useful to those of us who work for someone besides AdaCore.