Re: From extended Pascals to Ada 95 guide

["Marin D. Condic" <mcondic-nospam@acm.org>]

David Botton wrote:
> 
> You should have contacted ACT. GLIDE combined with CLAW and GNATCOM at the
> time would have given you the IDE (GLIDE), the GUI (CLAW) and the leverage
> of all of MS's latest technologies (GNATCOM), and would have offered you
> just as much (BTW, as a _very_ long term developer of MFC apps, you quickly
> have to throw out the generated code to get most things done on large
> projects :-). There are additional solutions available (and up and coming)
> now, so on your next project, I wouldn't back down from Ada :-)
> 
I've got two projects that are in the discussion stages right now where
I'd like to consider using Ada. The big advantage would be one of
portability across Sun/PC platforms. I may end up trying to cobble
together all the pieces and construct a development environment that
will get the job done.

I still find it a bit of a roadblock that there isn't a shrink-wrap kit
available that has everything bundled together with suitable
documentation. People here will often respond with "Oh, well, you can
download this from here and then go get that from there and then get
this other piece from here and you can modify the source for ABC to make
it do XYZ and yada yada yada". Sure, you can do that. You'll end up with
something that maybe works, but you are spending time pulling together
the environment and customizing/integrating it, instead of building the
software you get paid to build. Documentation will be spotty and
inconsistent. The guy that comes after you on the project is going to
get stuck trying to figure out how to make it work. There are a lot of
costs associated with doing a "roll your own" environment.

With MSVC++, a lot of the problems go away. I insert a disk and install
the environment. I fire up a single program and every tool is available
from there. I have a question about anything? I highlight it and punch
F1 and the documentation is right there. There are books available that
can teach you how to use it. 

While I'm no big proponent of C++ and I'd *much* rather use Ada than
anything else, I've got to consider the ramp-up time and time to market
issues. This is a business which needs to make money and the "best" way
of doing something is not always the most profitable. Because I've got
future projects that will probably need to cross platforms, I've got
good reasons to look at things like GtkAda and GNAT as potential tools.
But it sure would be nice if I could get something in a single box that
did basically what MSVC++ does. (It could be a good business opportunity
in itself to integrate what is out there into a kit and see if it could
sell. :-)

MDC
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Marin David Condic - Quadrus Corporation - http://www.quadruscorp.com/
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            what a sound central bank must always do. 
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