Re: GNAT GPL Edition - on the plus side

["Dmitry A. Kazakov" <mailbox@dmitry-kazakov.de>]

On Thu, 13 Oct 2005 18:41:01 -0700, Steve wrote:

> GNAT GPL Edition includes the first version of GPS I have run on Windows 
> that I haven't removed after a few days of frustration.

I tried it and then removed after two days.
 
> The compiler seems to just plain work (as usual).

As usual, you said? I have an impression that the compiler has no less bugs
than 3.15p had, maybe more. This time I was unable to work around its new
bugs in generics (some old ones are still there.) This is different to my
previous [nasty] experience with 3.15p generics. So far I managed to find a
way around. But with GNAT GPL it looks somewhat hopeless. Especially
because of its habit to report errors upon instantiation, do they use C
preprocessor, or what? (:-))

> IMHO the folks at AdaCore have done a great job.

Well, IDE was significantly improved. Though with a crippled compiler it
makes little sense, especially if we are talking about an *Ada* compiler!

I would do appreciate if they redesigned generics from scratch. Generics
never worked right in GNAT. It looks much like an architectural problem...
Maybe then they could finally make generic bodies reusable, error messages
meaningful, generic specifications compilable etc...

Also, I think, they could publish under [GM]GPL their compiler test suite.

-- 
Regards,
Dmitry A. Kazakov
http://www.dmitry-kazakov.de