Re: Gnat on OpenVMS

[nickerson@pundit.ds.boeing.com ()]

In article <7i98qg$dhr$1@nnrp1.deja.com>, 
Robert Dewar <dewar@gnat.com> writes:
|>In article <1999May22.193351.1@eisner>,
|>  Kilgallen@eisner.decus.org.nospam wrote:
|>
|>> There may be some economics at work here, as GDB folk are
|>> accustomed to moving readily between many operating systems so
|>> long as they are all some form of Unix.
|>
|>No, they don't need to be some form of Unix, GDB is being
|>used successfully on many non-Unix operating systems. Indeed
|>all my own personal work is on OS/2, where GDB works just fine.
|>
|>I think it is definitely true that people who move between many
|>targets prefer tools that are uniform across targets. We have
|>a couple of users of the VMS version who simply have a
|>requirement to produce a VMS version of their software, but
|>they also work on many other platforms. People in this position
|>are of course far happier to use GDB than the VMS debugger,
|>since they do not want to learn idiosyncratic target dependent
|>tools for each target.

actually "it is definitely true" is NOT a true statement; it is
your reading of the tea leaves; counterexample - I also program 
on DUX (Digital UNIX - now Compaq's Tru64 unix), and on that 
platform I prefer the "native debugger" ladebug and not GDB;
again that is because of the usability of ladebug (hint: it looks
a lot like VMSdebugger to me) and my lack of expertise with GDB; 

(I will attempt to remedy my ignorance and give a more informed 
critique as time permits);

|>Actually I see nothing specially unixy about GDBTK (or DDD for
|>that matter). The whole point of TK or GTK is to provide target
|>independence for GUI's. There may be things you don't like about
|>GDBTK, but I doubt they are specifically unix related in any
|>sense. Equally there may be things you like, but there again,
|>I doubt there is any real unix involvement.
|>
|>Robert Dewar
|>Ada Core Technologies

on VMS the need for a fullscreen debugger meant that you had to
also provide tcl/tk; not necessarily a trivial task, but OTOH a
nice service;

--bn (Bart Nickerson)
nickerson@pundit.ds.boeing.com
(206) 662-0183