Re: Colored Code

["Simon North" <sintac -at- home -dot- nl>]

Well, thank you all for the opinions, and the people who provided me 
some tips on how to mangle the output to implement the color coding. I 
must admit to being a little disappointed at the results. 

Years ago, I was responsible for editing and producing software 
engineering documentation (specs, requirements, and so on) for 
defense software. One particular application was 2.5 million lines of 
code and, with an average of one page of documentation per line of 
source code, I was interested in looking at ways of improving the 
coverage. I vaguely remembered reading Gellenbeck on the subject, but 
as I remember his attempts to typset code were pretty over the top and, 
while suitable for C, were not much use for Ada. 

Sadly, not one of you pointed me in a useful direction, but good ol' 
Google got me there in the end. I have a load of URLs if anyone is 
interested, but the bottom line is that code signalling (that's what it is 
called) is useful when editing code, but is an obstacle to code 
comprehension. Indentation and white space are good; color is bad. 
Sources are Fitter, Gellenbeck, and a very useful report from CMU 
(Human-Computer Interaction Institute Technical Report CMU-
HCII-96-10). 

Simon North. 

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