Re: Feasibility of using Ada in new development

[dan.r.mcleran@seagate.com (Dan McLeran)]

Georg Bauhaus <sb463ba@l1-hrz.uni-duisburg.de> wrote in message news:<cgkioh$rdc$3@a1-hrz.uni-duisburg.de>...
> Dan McLeran <dan.r.mcleran@seagate.com> wrote:
>  
> : As far as Ada is concerned, I recently gave the GNAT Pro toolsuite a
> : test drive for my own company's development needs and came away
> : unimpressed.  I think the Ada language is great, but these tools leave
> : alot to be desired. Aonix makes an Ada plugin for Eclipse
> 
> Have you had a chance to look at a more recent GPS?
> I'm courious what you consider the big gap between it and, say,
> Eclipse.
> 
> -- Georg


It was GPS 2.0.0. and GtkAda 2.0.0. Also note that I am running on
Windows XP.
Some of the ABCs of IDE I thought were missing:

1. No code completion help. Practically evey IDE on the planet has
this (even the free AdaGIDE has it!).

2. The IDE would crash if I edited my source file outside of GPS.

3. The GPS project wizard would sometimes get jacked up when I tried
to create a new project. No specifcs here but it was annoying. It only
happened a couple of times and I don't know exactly what I did wrong.

4. The GtkAda GUI builder is unable to allow you to write in your
event handler code and then re-generate the GUI. If you generate
source code from the visual gui builder, and then fill in event
handler code, the next time you re-gen the GUI, all of the files get
overwritten.

5. The fact that the GUI builder was a separate application and not
integrated into the IDE was hokey, IMO.

6. The GUI widgets weren't impressive. It looks like the GTK widgets
take the lowest common denominator approach to multi-platform GUI
toolkits. Contrast this with SWT for Java.

7. The help system would get screwed up as I tried scrolling thru it.

I was actually surprised that it wasn't alot better, considering how
much money ACT wants for supporting it.