Re: Ada Mode for Emacs

[David Marceau <davidmarceau@sympatico.ca>]

Jeremy wrote:
> Emacs is the best for Ada!

Someone once said: "Great minds think alike" :)

I'm not saying I have a great mind but I'm with ya :)

My favourite Emacs features:
----------------------------
-integrated make/context-sensitive compiler error output opening up the
buffer with the selected compiler error
-the best global multi-file search and replace system using tags files
-pretty formatting
-beautiful two-up/four-up postscript printing
-context-sensitive word completion
-elisp macros/elisp macro debugger
-multi-buffer 
-multi-window
-multi-level undo
-multi-clipboard for pasting any previous copy cut
-the best bookmark facility ever to date
-the built-in info facility(the only thing missing is a smarter info
search engine facility dare I say � la old MS-DevNet 1992 gui search
facility).

Dream emacs features:
---------------------
UML/round-trip engineering � la Rational Rose from within emacs.  
IMHO UML diagrams are very productive for team-communication.
It would be interesting to have some fashion to represent the
interaction/sequence/fsm... inside the actual source code instead of
having
to have a separate model files as necessary with products such as
Rational Rose.
Also, it would be interesting to see a console-based character gui for
representing/editing uml diagrams and generating ada-source.
Obviously this would imply once finished doing your uml design, you
could regenerate your ada-source 
and generate high-quality postscript uml diagrams and documentation.
IMHO, and correct me if I am wrong, the Rational Rose documentation
generator is still not the ideal
since actual diagrams are pasted as contents into the MS-WORD documents.
What this means is every time you change the model, you need to
regenerate the entire WORD document which could take very long for large
models.
IMHO the proposed solution would use a different .ps file for every
different diagram and then checking the DTG of the source file � la make
against the actual UML diagram/document to build would yield a more
efficient solution.  That solution blasts away the COM/OLE moniker
necessity IMHO 
which Rose doesn't use anyways for its UML diagrams.  Instead of using
DCOM/OLE monikers or pasted METAFILES(Rose does this), cvs ssh/nfs
mounted file systems do the trick even if the file system is remote. 
That blows away most of the complexity of using DCOM/OLE :)

All-in-all gnat Ada-emacs is where I am most happy developing stuff
after having done some ada/java/c++/c on different os's and different
machines.

Sant� bonheur,
David Marceau