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From: kilgallen@eisner.decus.org (Larry Kilgallen, LJK Software)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada
Subject: Re: Decent ADA compiler on a Mac
Message-ID: <1995Mar22.145303.9449@eisner>
Date: 22 Mar 95 14:53:03 -0500
References: <3kb9rs$622@goanna.cs.rmit.edu.au>  <3kpahd$6t0@gnat.cs.nyu.edu>
Organization: DECUServe
Date: 1995-03-22T14:53:03-05:00
List-Id: <comp.lang.ada>

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