Re: 'with'ing and 'use'ing

[Charles Hixson <charleshixsn@earthlink.net>]

Robert Dewar wrote:

> --snip

> Difficult to "start" including something that is already there!
>

Well...
I am a total tyro at Ada, esp. GNAT.  I have intermittent contact
with it, and no deep familiarity.  So these comments are to be taken
as "Experiences than an untutored outsider might have."
After reading the e-mails I pulled up the AdaGIDE to search for a
cross-reference generator.  Nothing obvious.  So I pulled up the
help menu and searched there.  Nothing.
I accept that there is a cross-reference generator, but it doesn't
seem to make contact with the IDE.  The location of the
documentation is not obvious.  Etc.
The reference to gnatxref tells me the name of the program, and I
assume that if I invoke it as:
gnatxref -?
or some variation that I will get a list of options.  But the
existence was not obvious.  At first I was embarrassed to have
missed the very feature that I was asking for, however after
re-examining the situation from the standpoint of knowing that it
exists and what it's name was, I no longer feel that way.  It seems
to be included as an afterthought rather than as an essential tool.
It seems to be neither included on a menu nor documented.  If I had
been browsing through my disk catalog and encountered it, how
certain would I have been of its function?  Probably not very!  That
it was a cross-reference generator might well have been the primary
supposition, but that it might well be something else would
certainly have been in my thoughts.  I can't now know, of course,
but my guess is that I would have hesitated long before I tried to
use it.  So many programs do things which are not what one would
have guessed from their names.  (E.g., it might have been a program
for managing the database of library linkages, and the default
action might be to start a new library.)