Re: GNAT for MS Visual Studio

["William J Thomas" <wjthomas@wcvt.com>]

Randy,

I'm not talking about just a programming environment. I'm talking about a 
GUI builder, a program that allows me to develop graphically oriented 
programs, more specifically one that would allow me to develop MS Window 
Forms programs in the Ada Language!!!

I can get Visual FORTRAN and Visual Cobol all running under MS Visual 
Studio, all allowing me to develop much more graphically sophisticated (and 
usable) programs than I can ever dream of with any Ada compiler that now 
exists under the Windows environment.

It's not that difficult to understand what I want, I just want Visual Ada 
instead of C#. I want it running in the same environment, with all the Ada 
oriented IntelliSense, with tools to help me generate Help files, and an 
uncountable Class library all with Ada interfaces, with oodles and oodles of 
import pragmas. I want to be able drag and drop in a PageSetupDialog and 
watch it jump into the area under my form, I want to be able drag and drop a 
DataGridView and be intimidated by all of the Ada event routines I'll have 
to work with, I want to be able to drop in a FlowLayoutPanel and have it....

Do you get the picture Randy, and that's another thing I want is a 
PictureBox so I can go over to my property view and set the file path to my 
gif file. But I want it all inside MS Visual Studio. I want it to look and 
feel like every other language under Visual Studio except I want it to be 
Ada.

That's all.

And I wouldn't be so sure about the government agency. It's either a 
government agency or Satan himself that's keeping Ada from being a 
successful language in the Windows scheme of things. Or it could just be 
those evil Ada Vendors that have been blinded by the Lord because they have 
forsaken the quest of Ada proliferation and have drifted, some to the right 
and some to the left, none have stayed the course, none have reached the 
promise land, all have fallen short.

You know what I mean Randy.

"Randy Brukardt" <randy@rrsoftware.com> wrote in message 
news:fcv43c$8sg$1@jacob-sparre.dk...
> "William J Thomas" <wjthomas@wcvt.com> wrote in message
> news:13f3e0vbb05s47c@corp.supernews.com...
> ...
>> No MS Visual Studio GUI building capability.
>>
>> Tell me is there some secret government agency out there preventing Ada
> from
>> having a good, reliable GUI builder on MS Windows?
>
> I doubt that, I think it is more that many of us can't figure out 
> precisely
> what such a tool would offer over the tried-and-true command line tools.
> (Yes, I do the vast majority of my programming from an MS-DOS window using
> the same 1980s editor I've always used.) Sure, I can imagine some really
> neat features, but those would be impractical (lousy response time,
> unrealistic requirements, probably would need an incremental Ada compiler 
> to
> implement them).
>
> We've seriously looked at this issue, and concluded that a decent
> programming environment would take more than 3 man-years to create: longer
> than implementing the majority of the Amendment changes to the language. 
> And
> only a few people would want to use it (me, and possibly you, and I don't
> know of any others.), because they all want Visual Studio or Eclipse or
> something else that isn't designed to work with Ada. As such, there is no
> possibility of recouping the investment in time and money, so I think 
> you'll
> be waiting essentially forever on that one. (We are working on a simple
> Windows programming environment, but it will not have anything fancy; it 
> is
> aimed simply to make our compiler more usable to those who can't handle a
> command line. And the only reason we're doing that is that we can't update
> the one we have currently - no source code.)
>
>                                        Randy.
>
>
>
>