Re: IDE's that support ADA

[Florian Weimer <fw@deneb.enyo.de>]

* Stephen Leake:

> Meaning it attempts to parse the syntax after typing every character? So
> if you start typing 'if ... then ... else .. end if', you get errors
> until you type 'endif'? Yuck.

You get red squiggly lines under the code, much like in a word
processor with on-the-fly spell checking.  I find that completely
non-intrusive.  It does not even take up valuable screen real estate.

> Hmm. You said "semantic", not "syntactic". So this means a full compile
> with name and type resolution, not just a syntax parse. That makes sense
> for simpler languages; I don't think it makes much sense for Ada.

I don't think semantic analysis on partial programs is more difficult
for Ada than for C++ (in fact, it's probably easier in many common
cases because there is less ambiguity between expressions and types).
Semantic completion has been implemented for C++, I don't see why it
would be technically infeasible for Ada.  There are areas which are
rather difficult, like ambigous overloads which are only resolved once
more program text is available, but so are lambda expressions in Java
8, and IDE will manage somehow.

Actually, I would consider it rather useful.  It's not just the
auto-completion, you'd also bee able to see docstrings of referenced
entities while typing (this functionality is reasonably easy to add
once you now where those entities are defined).  That I would find
rather useful.