Re: Ada for 1st year students

[christoph.grein@eurocopter.com]

> I was just painfully reminded of what I really dislike about GPS and
> these sort of IDEs in general. You cannot build a program! You have to
> create a "project", then configure here, configure there. Total BS. It
> completely ruined my class yesterday, about building and executing
> Hello world! I will ditch GPS and call gnatmake upon Ada directly.
> It's easier to learn and control and use. Unfortunately we loose the
> baby (the editor) with the bath water (the "IDE"). I'll probably use
> AdaGIDE. Thanks.

I don't understand this. If you have a more complex system (files
distributed over many directories), use of a GNAT project file eases
building the program. This has nothing to do with GPS:

gnatmake -P project_file ...

GPS helps you in creating the project file and when you press Build,
it calls gnatmake resp. gprmake as you would do it from the command
line. So where is the problem?

Of course, AdaGIDE is much simpler, so it's good for beginners, but
use of it for my daily work - only over my dead body... (I use a set
of about 20 project files, all being imported by the "main" project,
to build the system. And replacing Ada units for experimental changes
without changing the original units is really easy with extension
projects, even in parallel by different developers/testers - and you
have all changed units together in one place, irrespective of where
the originals are located.)