From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.4.4 (2020-01-24) on polar.synack.me X-Spam-Level: X-Spam-Status: No, score=-0.9 required=5.0 tests=BAYES_00,FORGED_GMAIL_RCVD, FREEMAIL_FROM autolearn=no autolearn_force=no version=3.4.4 Path: border2.nntp.dca.giganews.com!nntp.giganews.com!usenet.blueworldhosting.com!feeder01.blueworldhosting.com!peer02.iad.highwinds-media.com!news.highwinds-media.com!feed-me.highwinds-media.com!post02.iad.highwinds-media.com!fx31.iad.POSTED!not-for-mail From: Shark8 User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; Win64; x64; rv:31.0) Gecko/20100101 Thunderbird/31.0a1 MIME-Version: 1.0 Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada Subject: Re: ANN: Kickstarter for beginning work on a new open-source Compiler References: <5151491a-14c3-4138-bcb5-f29108aeefb9@googlegroups.com> In-Reply-To: Content-Type: text/plain; charset=windows-1252; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Message-ID: X-Complaints-To: abuse@teranews.com NNTP-Posting-Date: Thu, 20 Mar 2014 19:28:48 UTC Organization: TeraNews.com Date: Thu, 20 Mar 2014 13:30:44 -0700 X-Received-Bytes: 4546 X-Received-Body-CRC: 2198515507 X-Original-Bytes: 4565 Xref: number.nntp.dca.giganews.com comp.lang.ada:185234 Date: 2014-03-20T13:30:44-07:00 List-Id: On 19-Mar-14 14:04, Alan Browne wrote: > On 2014.03.18, 19:23 , Shark8 wrote: >> It is my belief that a new, non-GNAT, open-source [and free] Ada 2012 >> translator would be a good thing for both the Ada community and the >> general programming population -- this without even breaking from the >> traditional approaches. However, I think that a good, quality IDE/PSE >> could be quite advantageous; offering better project-management, >> documentation, verification, versioning, and correctness/consistency >> checking. >> >> The working-copy of the proposal is here: >> https://drive.google.com/file/d/0BwQVNNshW39cTXVOdWxQaVJ5WjA/edit?usp=sharing >> > > 0. Why is your exec summary so detailed? Because it's a working copy and I still have a lot to do, esp. WRT describing the tools-set. > 1. Delphi? Why not in Ada? Answered upthread: mostly possible issues in licensing and my rotten luck getting DB bindings to compile/link correctly. > 2. Your subject is "... a new open-source Compiler". Your project is > not so much about a compiler. Well, true: it's about a whole PSE (Programming Support Environment), but the Ada 83 Library is a decent step in that direction already. > 3. Text. Nothing wrong with that. You can ridicule it all you like > with quotations, but it is the lowest common denominator. That's a horrid argument; if we did that with editors we'd be using vi and Notepad (actually probably not even Notepad, as its interface is a direct result of Larry Tesler's crusade against modes, which was [then] the common thing in computers.) > Strawmen arguments like EOL and character sets is just distraction - such are > easily fixed/translated if not handled automatically. And yet they are relevant in that they are (sometimes surprisingly) more difficult to fix than you would initially think; there was one incident with CSV exported from Excel on PC vs Excel on a Mac that lead to some... interesting behavior in an import procedure. > 4. References to alleged poor design practices at Toyota are specious > and irrelevant. The Sony reference too. (You're employing "scare" > marketing. Bzzzt.). Really? Correctness should be a concern for programmers; could Toyota's errors have been made using Ada... *sure*, but some of them would have been easy to avoid (e.g. using protected objects for shared values.) Plus, I think Toyota would disagree that it's irrelevent, seeing how they just $1.2 bn settlement. See: http://www.politico.com/story/2014/03/toyota-settlement-doj-104809.html > 5. This whole project, to me, puts the programmer too far away from the > source code. Buries it. That is not a good objective. That's one problem I'm trying to address, it's not about burring the source, but getting closer to the [underlying] structure and ideas that the code is expressing. An example would be CASE statements, the language mandates that they have complete coverage (individually or via OTHERS) so would it be putting the programmer "too far away from the source" to allow something like "right-click > show as table" to convert the [possibly nested] CASE statement into a decision table? I mean we already have the mandate that all the possibilities must be covered. Or, imagine having the ability to visually tinker with a [sub]type; say you have Type Voltage is new Natural range 0 .. 220. that you could have represented with two sliders in the same channel (for 'First and 'Last) and possibly a tab for indicating [or specifying] the default/uninitialized value. (Perhaps packaging Annex H's "Pragma Normalize_Scalars" value right there with the type.)