Re: Representation clause for enumeratives

[Robert Dewar <dewar@gnat.com>]

In article <86pugpbct5.fsf@acm.org>,
  Laurent Guerby <guerby@acm.org> wrote:

> May be more users would update and reread documentation if
> each new manual had a "new and updated" section. (I already
> made this remark has a customer BTW, so this is not only
> "free user" wishlist ;-)

The features file is intended to exactly satisfy this need.
What we see most customers doing is to read through the
features file (it's pretty long, but that's because there
are a lot of new features :-) Each feature has a few line
description, and if you are interested in finding more, then
you can look in the manual for details.

> You can't expect users to reread a few hundred (boring even
> if  well-written) pages they've already mostly read every six
> monthes and do the mental diff (if it's even possible).

Exactly, that's why we provide the features file.

> The release notes for the technical part is very good, why
> not do the same for the documentation?
>
> I really hope the GNAT 3.14 documentation will have such a
> section, otherwise I probably won't read it, and this will
> nullify GNAT people work on it (at least for me).

You should read through the features file. That ends up being
a guide for new documentation features as well as new technical
features in the compiler. For example, here is one of several
entries in the 3.14 features file relating to documentation:

NF-314-7718-001 Linker_Options extensions now documented

  The documentation (GNAT Reference Manual) has been
  enhanced to contain full documentation of the GNAT
  implementation of the Linker_Options pragma. GNAT
  allows multiple arguments, and also allows the use
  of ASCII.NUL to separate arguments in a single string.

Robert Dewar
Ada Core Technologies


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