Re: an interested business-oriented programmer

[Ted Dennison<dennison@telepath.com>]

In article <3B1EAAB4.5C86F53D@lmtas.lmco.com>, Gary Scott says...
>Obviously.  What we're talking about is expanding Ada's market.  I too
>would prefer that extensions be kept to a minimum.  I'm not familiar
>enough with Ada to know that extensions would be required simply to
>access the Win32 C-based API (I hadn't thought so).  Those are the only
>extensions that I'm aware of that MIGHT be required for some other
>languages (at least until the next standard revision).  

Gnat manages to do it with just "stdcall" as an interface convention, which is
allowed by the RM. Gnat has lots of other (allowed) extensions, but to my
knowledge that's the only one that is required to deal with the Win32 API.
Really nothing outside the LRM is *required*. However, the larger mass-market
compiler vendors prefer to tie their customers in with proprietary language
extensions and GUI interfaces that do everything for you so you don't have to
learn how its done yourself.

>If you want to get STUDENTS trained in Ada, then you've got to make it
>easy for them.  They're NOT going to accept a basic command line tool
>set environment to any great extent (sure a few 'geeks' will).

After my recent stint as a graduate student dealing with undergrads, my fear is
that you are absolutely right here. The students I dealt with were totally lost
without VisualStudio, even the sharper ones.

Still, I'd think you are doing students a great disservice if they never learn
how to use a compiler from the command-line. Sure, the high-level stuff is
pretty, and can automate some simple tasks. But they should't graduate thinking
that everything under their GUI is magic. They shouldn't be afraid of having to
learn to use different tools.

I find it amusing that you seem to be using "geeks" above as a synonym for
"people who really know what they are doing". That's fine, as it goes ("geeks"
is certainly shorter). But shouldn't we be teaching students to really know what
they are doing? If not, what good is the degree? (I'm sorry, this isn't your
issue. Its a separate one. I'll shut up about it now.)

Another often-neglected fact it that Emacs actually serves quite well as an IDE
for Gnat. The only thing that's kind of a pain is adding directories to the
project search path (there's good support for it, but no "browse" or filename
completion to help with the task). To top it off, Emacs can do tons of things
that most other editors can't. Most other Windows Ada compilers also have some
kind of IDE (usually a bit more graphical than emacs, but also less powerful).

Perhaps there aren't any free VisualStudio clones out there that come with an
Ada compiler. But then VisualStudio itself isn't free either, is it?


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