Re: ada-mode (was Re: need editor)

[john@assen.demon.co.uk.nospam (John McCabe)]

abuse@borpin.demon.co.uk (Brian Orpin) wrote:

>There was some discussion about this either here or on the ada-mode list.
>There was a strong feeling that there should be an ada-mode and a
>gnat-mode with functions available only to users of Gnat in a separate
>package.  IIRC Emmanuel is trying to move in this direction.  We use the
>Tartan compiler and I have made some local modifications to ada-mode and
>created a tartan-mode.  We currently do not have Gnat installed and
>available for use.

There was actually quite a lot of discussion on this at one point. I
was very keen for ada-mode to be compiler independent where possible
and was initially not very happy for maintenance to be taken over by
ACT. I was particularly disturbed about the amount of GNAT-specific
code that had gone into their first (?) attempt, and also that it was
based on what was then an 'old' version of ada-mode compared to what
those on the ada-mode mailing list had access to at the time.

During the discussions it was pointed out that as GNAT is a GNU
product, it seemed perfectly reasonable for emacs' ada-mode to depend
on it, but it was pretty much agreed between most of the people who
got into the discussion that the purely Ada based features of ada-mode
should be kept separate from anything that was compiler dependent and
Emmanuel has done a lot of work reorganising the files that comprise
ada-mode into something that fits the bill.

ada-xref and so on use features of GNAT, however most of these
features will be available in other compilers and it is really a
matter for either the users of those compilers, or the compiler
vendors themselves to implement this functionality for their products.

I would suggest that if you do use a compiler other than GNAT that
either:

a) Doesn't come with an editor
b) Has a really naff editor (e.g. ObjectAda)

then contact the vendor and suggest that they put some effort into
replicating the ACT developed parts of ada-mode for their own
products. Emmanuel has already done a lot of the work providing the
structure, all they need to do is mess around with it to provide the
interface to their stuff.

I know for example that Stephen Leake has developed some Emacs Lisp to
interface to the ObjectAda Command Line Debugger. There's nothing
stopping Aonix from doing that themselves.

IMO, I can't see why any compiler vendor produces an editor when Emacs
is available!

>IMHO it is wrong for ACT to hijack ada-mode and make it dependent on
>gnat.  A gnat-mode would be more in keeping with the spirit of Emacs.

c.g. cc-mode - aren't the default settings based in GCC?


Best Regards
John McCabe <john@assen.demon.co.uk>