Re: An Ada IDE and discussions

[Al Christians <alc@PublicPropertySoftware.com>]

Ted Dennison wrote:
> 
> In article <JeX37.39341$B56.8075497@news2-win.server.ntlworld.com>, chris.danx
> says...
> >controls to be created, and more.  Also is Gtk not scripted, slowing the whole
> >thing down?
> 
> No, you are probably thinking of TK. Gtk is written in C and has a C interface.
> Its a rather nice toolkit too. The only thing I'd really like to see that it
> doesn't have is some kind of loadable interface definition language, like UIL.
> But if you are set on something that will be intuitively familiar to Windows
> users, you'd probably be better off using the base Windows UI, as Gtk probably
> doesn't have an equivalent for *everything*.
> 

I have the idea that it is expected that GNAT will soon (whatever that
means, say over the next couple of years) be more compatible with the
other gcc implementations, in particular the c++ compiler.  Will that
make it easier for Ada code compiled by GNAT to interoperate with C++ 
gui code (eg wxWindows and/or fltk)?  

If that was possible, I would suggest that it might be better to try
to promote Ada as a powerful back-end engine, and not get into one of
these 10-year gui toolkit projects (look at how long wxWindows has been
developing, eg).   

In a good gui development system, maybe the developer doesn't have a
lot of need to look at the gui code and doesn't care what kind of 
language it's in. Graphical programming (graphically connecting UI 
the rest of the program) as in IBM Visual Age might be fine.  So 
might XML.  Who cares where it goes from there? 

An Ada IDE with gui builder could build a UI in c++ for one of the c++ 
toolkits and hide the c++ so that the developer would not normally 
see it.  There is some kind of gui spaghetti that develops when one
starts writing too much code in the middle of gui classes.  An IDE that
prevented this by forcing separation of UI and implementation could be 
advantageous.  

Al