Re: Ada development environments

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

Ada2001 <ada2001@my-deja.com> wrote:

>In article <39BD3696.797AFE23@west.raytheon.com>,
>  Jerry Petrey <jdpetreyNOSPAM@west.raytheon.com> wrote:
>>
>>
>> Bruce Petrick wrote:
>> >
>> > Any truth to the rumors that Rational may stop supporting Apex?
>> >
>> > Does anyone know where to find a "current" list of vendors of
>> > Ada95 development environments (for Sun Sparc)?
>>
>> I doubt it.  They are introducing Apex 4.0 very shortly.  I just
>> attended
>> a Rational web seminar where they showed their plans for the new 4.0
>> releases
>> continuing into next year.  Apex is one of their major products - I'm
>> sure
>> it will be around for quite some time.  It is a pleasure to use, I
>might
>> add.

>I agree that Apex on a Unix host is a *VERY* capable development
>environment.  I like it very much.  However Rational's Apex for Windows
>NT uses a very different Interactive Development Environment (IDE); it
>seems to have been developed by a group that had never really used Apex
>on Unix. Even the latest release (3.2.0b patch 2) is deficient in many
>ways relative to Apex Unix.  I hope the 4.0 release of Apex NT will be
>better.

In case anyone isn't aware, it would appear that Rational's Rose
product (at least version 98i) for Unix (Solaris) actually uses a
Windows subsystem emulator to produce a GUI that is pretty much
identical to the NT version, so it would seem reasonable to assume
that, for Rose at least, they will be using the NT version as a
baseline. (Correct me if I'm wrong obviously :-)

I wouldn't be at all surprised if that is the way they will be going
with Apex.


PS - If you get a new release of Apex, check out whether the bug
related to the discriminant of a private extension is corrected:

type X (Disc : <sometype>) is tagged record with
   :
   :
end record;

type Y (Disc : <sometype>) is new X (Disc) with private;

(I think this is the basis of it) This is illegal but is compiled
without error on (what I believe is) the current version of Apex.
Unfortunately it is also a bug in Rose because Rose generates code
that matches this :-(

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