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From: MARTIN@SCRANTON.BITNET
Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada
Subject: RE:  DEC tools for Ada
Message-ID: <9104201436.AA25813@ajpo.sei.cmu.edu>
Date: 20 Apr 91 15:32:00 GMT
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List-Id: <comp.lang.ada>

J, Nino writes:

>I would like to receive comments on first-hand experiences with the tools
>DEC provides for Ada development. I do not know yet of the exact nature of
>them, only that DEC has some available including a language sensitive editor.
>Any comments?

DEC has an integrated toolkit called VAXSet that works for most of the DEC
supported languages.  One of the tools is an LSE.  We (University of Scranton)
have been using the LSE for about four years to support programming in
Pascal, Modula-2, and Ada.  We think that its effect on our program has been
significant and beneficial.

Bad side:  the documentation standards used by DEC in the templates generated
are unsatisfactory for an academic environment.

Good side:  the LSE is fully and easily modifiable (the LSE is one of the
languages supported by the LSE).

We started using the LSE with Modula-2 as DEC does not support Modula-2 and
our compiler vendor at the time did not support LSE.  We (actually, I) wrote
an LSE file for Modula-2 incorporating documentation standards that our
department had been discussing.  After a successful experience, we went
back and modified the DEC supplied Pascal file to have the same "look and
feel" as Modula-2 but for standard Pascal.  When we switched to Ada as our
main teaching language, we modified the DEC supplied LSE file to reflect
our standards.  We then went back and remodified Pascal to reflect the Ada
style (mostly case conventions).

Our students can code without the LSE as well as former students did before
the LSE, they document significantly better, and they spend a larger part
of their time on designing rather than coding than provious students did.

I have played with several of the other tools in VAXSet but they are more
relevant to non-academic settings where projects are larger and involve
multiple programmers.  The exception is the Module Management System which
provides a "make" facility useful in Modula-2 (DEC Ada has its own library
manager so doesn't need the MMS).

                                        Dennis S. Martin
                                        Dept of Computing Sciences
                                        Univ of Scranton
                                        Scranton PA 18510-4664
                                        BITNET:MARTIN@SCRANTON