Re: Rant! (was) Development process in the Ada community

[Al Reynolds <alan1@bellatlantic.net>]

GtkAda has been ported to MacOS X.  We needed to build GVD, which uses GtkAda, to provide a user-friendly interface to 
our Ada-aware version of GDB so that we can more readily debug our Ada binding to Apple's Carbon API :)

Of course, by "ported" what I meant is we compiled it and the demo ran fine (thanks to Ada).  I'm guessing that most of 
the effort went into porting Gtk+ (thanks to C) ;)

I don't know if a GUI standard is required for Ada or for any other language.  From my own experience it wasn't that C++ 
was standard (because it wasn't) but the STL (which also wasn't a standard) made it possible to hack at twice the speed 
which is what appealed to me.  The same goes for Perl (also not a standard) which has mega-functionality attached to 
short character sequences and libraries that cover most application domains.  Whenever I need to do something *just 
once* I can reach out and use the language or environment, standard or not, which provides the greatest support for the 
problem at hand.  What appeals to me about Ada is that I have to be disciplined enough to get my code past the damn 
compiler! After that it's doing what I enjoy so much with the other languages: debugging :)

<RANT>
So, if we really want to make Ada popular what we have to do is make it possible to hack in Ada quickly.  That's what 
GUI support is all about. That's what IDE's are all about.  That's what libraries for containers, math, parsing, 
networking, etc, are all about.  We want Ada to become a strongly-typed, scripting language.
</RANT>

Have fun,
Al

Ted Dennison wrote:
> "Eric G. Miller" <egm2@jps-nospam.net> wrote in message news:<pan.2002.04.17.21.35.54.963686.16266@jps-nospam.net>...
> 
>>There is no connection between Tk and Gtk, though both have similar
>>goals (gui abstraction layer and toolkit).  AFAIK, both are written
>>in C.
> 
> 
> Just to be complete it should be mentioned that there are good Ada
> bindings available for both.
> 
> 
>>That is one benefit of Tk.  It's been around longer, and has been
>>ported to more systems than Gtk.  But my impression is that Gtk2
>>smokes Tk in widget functionality, and certainly the Gtk1.x look and
>>"feel" is better than most Tk programs I've used.  I suspect in a
> 
> 
> I switched from Tk to Gtk as my default Ada gui about 2 years ago for
> precisely that reason. The only sore spot with Gtk is that it isn't
> yet supported on Macs. I suspect that will change soon, at least for
> OSX.
> 
> For those looking for a defacto Ada GUI standard, I would say that it
> is already here with GtkAda, as much as we will ever have a standard.
> Perhaps it would help everyone to realise its "standard" status if we
> distributed it with future Gnat builds? :-)
>