Re: GNAT GPL is proving...educational

[Stephen Leake <stephen_leake@stephe-leake.org>]

Alan Jump <alan.jump@gmail.com> writes:

> On Sunday, July 21, 2013 8:26:10 PM UTC-7, Jeffrey Carter wrote:
>
>> Stacks.Vector is a child package; its parent is package Stacks. Package Stacks 
>> must exist to have child packages.
>
> Tried it. Didn't work. GNAT responded "stacks.vector.ads language
> unknown". 

Try again, more carefully. The file name should be "stacks-vector.ads".

Slow down, read the manual, be careful. Ada does work, GNAT does work;
there are millions of lines of code out there proving it.

> I don't mind this at all. Especially with the option to generate body
> stubs from spec files. It works to make sure the body I write meets
> the spec I write. I wish Java had been that strict when I was learning
> that language; it would have saved me many hours of debugging, not to
> mention avoiding more than a few platefuls of spaghetti code. All I'm
> pointing out here is that it's forcing a shift in thinking about how I
> draft both specs and bodies, and that's a Very Good Thing(tm).

Except that you seem to have missed that it does support parent and
child packages, which is a very important feature.

>> GNAT also requires one compilation unit per source file, but this again is not 
>> something defined by the language, and many compilers will accept files 
>> containing multiple compilation units. Many experienced Ada software engineers 
>> find having a single compilation unit per file a good idea.
>
> Here's another neophyte question, then...are specs and bodies
> considered separate compilation units? 

Yes.

-- 
-- Stephe