Re: Decent ADA compiler on a Mac

[dewar@cs.nyu.edu (Robert Dewar)]

Matthew Sargent says:

"I will have to speak up on that one. Command line interfaces are not
better for compiling and linking (and debugging). Look at all the IDEs out
there for C/C++/Pascal and _Ada_ too! They really are a pleasure to use
and make managing the closure of your program much easier."

(am I msiremembering or is this a duplicated message, if so, then this
reply is probably duplicated too, sorry about that!)

Any IDE that does not provide the ability of writing, storing and executing
command sequences is totally useless as far as I am concerned. Sure a visual
interface can help with many things. As many operating systems show (e.g.
OS/2) it is perfectly possible to integrate a command line interface and
a visual interface and use the best of either world for the task at hand.
I used a MAC extensively for a while, and eventually found that the complete
lack of  command line support was unacceptable. For example, compiling a
program from a directory selecting files on the basis of their names is
typically much more easily done using a command line interface. Sure I
perfectly well understand that any particular operation can be done using
some neat visual interface, and a good IDE has built in visual interfaces
for common operations, but you can't achieve the generality of a command
line interface that way. Complex tasks inevitably involve some programming,
and you need a programming language underlying the interface structure to
achieve this comfortably.

Is it really true that the Rational IDE has no command line interface at
all, I have not looked at it. If the answer is that it doesn't, then I
must say I am not interested in looking at it. But I would guess that in
fact I will find that it is one of these combined interfaces in which
visual and command structure are nicely integrated.

The MAC is wonderful for trivial tasks, but perfectly awful for anything
complex. For example, installing my fonts on a MAC (I have over 1000 fonts)
involves clicking on each one separately -- madness!

So I really think that a nice development environment on the MAC needs to
construct at least a minimal command interpretor of some kind. A purely
visual interface would be OK for simple student mucking, but not for any
real work.