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From: Stephen Leake <stephen_leake@stephe-leake.org>
Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada
Subject: Re: ANN: Kickstarter for beginning work on a new open-source Compiler
References: <5151491a-14c3-4138-bcb5-f29108aeefb9@googlegroups.com>
Date: Wed, 19 Mar 2014 09:25:39 -0500
Message-ID: <857g7q6za4.fsf@stephe-leake.org>
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Xref: number.nntp.dca.giganews.com comp.lang.ada:185199
Date: 2014-03-19T09:25:39-05:00
List-Id: <comp.lang.ada>

Shark8 <onewingedshark@gmail.com> writes:

> The working-copy of the proposal is here:
> https://drive.google.com/file/d/0BwQVNNshW39cTXVOdWxQaVJ5WjA/edit?usp=sharing

You have clearly put a lot of thought into this.

I have a few comments/questions.

1) Why write the new tool in Delphi and not Ada?
    
    The Rationale section "Why implement in Delphi 2007" provides a
    rationale for implementing in dotnet, not Delphi. There is an Ada
    compiler for dotnet (I think it needs work, but you are already
    proposing a huge amount of work, so what's a little more?).

    And even that rationale is not convincing. Emacs, Eclipse, GPS are
    all portable to Linux and Windows; in what other environments do you
    require running the IDE?

2) The Rationale section "Why Write an Ada Compiler?" provides a
   justification for writing an IDE plugin, not an Ada compiler.

   You can easily extract text from the database and feed it to gnat, or
   any other Ada compiler.

3) Storing text as correct, structured data:

    a) has been tried before; in Rational R1000
       (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R1000 - not a very informative
       link, unfortunately). Did you review any lessons learned from
       that?

    b) Prevents people checking in code so colleagues can answer the
       question "why doesn't this compile"?

    c) Prevents writing skeletons; something I do when starting a
       totally new project.

4) You don't address "Why write a new IDE rather than a plugin for an
   existing one?"

    IDEs are huge, complex beasts. What you propose to do can be
    accommodated as a plugin for Eclipse, Emacs, or GPS.

    GPS from AdaCore is a nice Ada IDE, but it lacks many features that
    I find essential on a daily basis, which is why I use Emacs instead.
    Any new tool you start will be even more limited.

5) Current IDEs (GPS, Eclipse, less so Emacs) use a parsed
   representation of the source for refactoring, completion, and the
   other tasks you require in an IDE. That gives the best of both
   worlds.

6) What is your business plan? You are proposing to directly compete
   with AdaCore; it is not at all clear from the proposal that you
   understand what that means.

-- 
-- Stephe