From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.4.4 (2020-01-24) on polar.synack.me X-Spam-Level: X-Spam-Status: No, score=-1.3 required=5.0 tests=BAYES_00,INVALID_MSGID autolearn=no autolearn_force=no version=3.4.4 X-Google-Language: ENGLISH,ASCII-7-bit X-Google-Thread: 103376,c2f62556e56c9683 X-Google-Attributes: gid103376,public From: Charles Hixson Subject: Re: 'with'ing and 'use'ing Date: 2000/03/06 Message-ID: <38C3D86E.EE31E822@earthlink.net>#1/1 X-Deja-AN: 593853463 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit References: <38BC2EB3.2639372B@acm.org> <89l6aj$s5e$1@wanadoo.fr> <38BE974F.B8FAFEBE@earthlink.net> <89ml92$5c1$1@nnrp1.deja.com> <38BEF1A3.24B566BF@earthlink.net> <89rpuc$n9p$1@nnrp1.deja.com> X-Accept-Language: en Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii X-Complaints-To: abuse@earthlink.net X-Trace: newsread2.prod.itd.earthlink.net 952359029 198.94.156.19 (Mon, 06 Mar 2000 08:10:29 PST) Organization: EarthLink Inc. -- http://www.EarthLink.net MIME-Version: 1.0 NNTP-Posting-Date: Mon, 06 Mar 2000 08:10:29 PST Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada Date: 2000-03-06T00:00:00+00:00 List-Id: 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.)