Re: Decent ADA compiler on a Mac

[kilgallen@eisner.decus.org (Larry Kilgallen, LJK Software)]

In article <3kpahd$6t0@gnat.cs.nyu.edu>, dewar@cs.nyu.edu (Robert Dewar) writes:

> The MAC is wonderful for trivial tasks, but perfectly awful for anything
> complex. For example, installing my fonts on a MAC (I have over 1000 fonts)
> involves clicking on each one separately -- madness!

Typically one would "select all" and then drag them to the destination.
Whether particular utilities fail to support drag and drop is a measure
of implementation quality, but not of the overall User Interface Design
of the MacOS.

> So I really think that a nice development environment on the MAC needs to
> construct at least a minimal command interpretor of some kind. A purely
> visual interface would be OK for simple student mucking, but not for any
> real work.

By way of credentials, I have 16 years experience programming on VMS
(with RSX and TOPS-10 before that) so I am quite accustomed to using
command line interfaces.  I have spend 6 hours today so far in that
environment.

On the Macintosh, however, I find the Think Pascal IDE quite fine for
all my work.  The major problem is that the language behind it is quite
non-standard, and I presume any commercial Ada product would do much
better in that regard.

A poorly executed IDE is painful, but it _can_ be done right.

Larry Kilgallen