Re: Ada95 OOP Questions

[jvl@ocsystems.com (Joel VanLaven)]

Theodore E. Dennison (dennison@escmail.orl.mmc.com) wrote:
: Robert Dewar wrote:
: > 
: > So grep will not be enough, even if you ban USE. Really you need decent
: > tools to build Ada programs, and relying on grep for locating defining
: > occurrences of subprogram references is pretty miserable (note for
: > example that it fails in any case in the overloaded case). It is hard
: > for me to believe that there are Ada environments with no better
: > capabilities than grep for finding things.

: The only environment I have ever used that had anything better than grep
: was DEC's LSE/SCA combination. (I THINK it was "SCA", its been a while).
: SCA was painfully slow, even on multiprocessing VAXen. I tried it for two
: weeks before giving up on it.(Which made me hardier than anyone else on the
: project by about a week and a half). Apparently its no easy task to chase
: down references, even for a multiprocessing computer and Ada 83. The
: experience gave me a whole new respect for our "no use" coding policy.

: > With GNAT, you have two possibilities. For static analysis, you can use
: > gnatf, and then if you like, use the emacs interface to get straight from
: > applied to defining occurrences. (note that soon we will integrate gnatf
: > with gnat1 making this possibility a bit more convenient).

: That sounds cool. It makes sense that the compiler (or something built off
: of it) could do the most efficient and accurate job of chasing down 
: references. But how useful is this? Is it fast enough to be more of a 
: help than a hinderance? Does ANYONE do this? I take it you don't, since 
: you don't use emacs.

  I have to agree that the compiler should come with tools able to do 
your searching for you.  For our compiler we put this into the soure code
"browser."  The browser has access to most of the information that the
compiler produces (it keeps it in a library) so it is quite fast.  I
find it very useful, especially when dealing with someone else's code!
Without such tools at my disposal I think I might never work on large
projects at all... :)

-- Joel
-- 
-- Joel VanLaven