Re: Emacs Ada code navigation tools

[Mats Weber <Mats.Weber@elca-matrix.ch>]

dennison@telepath.com wrote:

> As I remember it, that required using a third tool (in addition to LSE and
> DecAda). As it has been about 8 years, I don't remember its three-letter
> acronym anymore.

It is SCA (for Source Code Analyzer).

> What I do remember is that it was so slow it was next to useless. It would
> take several minutes to find a declaration. In that amount of time you could
> easily find it yourself with "search". Plus it took its information from the
> symbol table, so if you significantly changed your source since the last
> compile it wouldn't work right anymore. I was the only developer out of 50+
> developers on the project who used it more than a day, and I gave up on it
> after a week. Even DTM was more useful!

For me, it was more like 3 seconds to get to the declaration. The reason I
stopped using it is that LSE became an unstable mess when they merged VMS/UNIX
implementations, and you had to throw away your whole environment at every new version.

I found that tool very useful when putting new people on a project, or when a
programmer has over-used use clauses, a case where grep/search does not help much.

Anyway, I didn't start this thread to talk about the old days, but about what
can be done _now_ with Emacs :-)