Re: The Ada experience.

[dennison@telepath.com (Ted Dennison)]

henderson was no auteur <morbid_dreams@cia.gov> wrote in message news:<9a25nugj860iofuv46h2l2bbvlgf4ophc0@4ax.com>...
> >I still think that the greatest obstacle is the Ada out of box experience. 
> 
> I have to agree.
> I have never used the pro version of GNAT. ( no big bucks here)
> However, the free version with the various free IDEs is abyssmal.
> 
> It feels like something out of the sixties.

I'm guessing you are comparing it to VisualC++, no?

I suppose it depends on your perspective. For me, developing using
VisualC++ (version 6.0) feels like playing with a toy compared to the
Gnat toolkit. The editor is nice looking, but not nearly functional
enough. The compiler doesn't implement the language properly (or even
very well). Template support is a particular disaster. It has
gawd-aful error messages, which causes the user way more work that
should be nessecary to figure out what they did wrong (its not
uncommon for something simple like a missing semicolon to pull an
error somewhere deep in a standard library header file). It comes with
a semi-functional non-standard version of the STL. To top it off, its
chock full of code-generation bugs, which act as little day-wasting
land mines for you to periodicly step on. And good luck trying to get
Bill G. to fix them for you, or getting the sources to fix them
yourself.

The code builder is too moronic figure out recompilation dependancies
without manual user intervention (which is just begging for errors).
Maintaining all those dependancies manually in a large project is
simply impossible.

But I'll grant you, its a nice *shiny* toy. :-)