Re: Decent ADA compiler on a Mac

[vladimir@speedy.intrepid.com (Vladimir Vukicevic)]

In article <sarge-2003952344040001@192.229.32.35> sarge@Rational.Com
(Matthew C. Sargent) writes:

> I will have to speak up on that one. Command line interfaces are not
> better for compiling and linking (and debugging). Look at all the
> IDEs out there for C/C++/Pascal and _Ada_ too! They really are a
> pleasure to use and make managing the closure of your program much
> easier.

All of these (with the notable exception of some Mac compilers
[MetroWerks and Symantec]) are simply fancy interfaces on top of
command line compiling/code-generation tools. All of Sun's stuff
is. SGI's WorkShop is. OS/2's C/Set++ tools are. Granted, all of these
provide graphical class browsers and the like, but the compilation
tools are command-line-level.

I agree that there should be some sort of a graphical user interface.
However, it should only be a driver to generate the right parameters
for the compiler, or to ensure correct compilation order, etc. Often,
using non-graphical interfaces is more efficient than using fancy
graphical tools for compilation. To compile a simple program, it's
much easier to type "gcc -o foo foo.c" than to have to have to create
a project file, add foo.c to that project, add all the necessary
libraries, and then select 'make' from some menu option. You are often
distracted by the multitude of options your GUI provides that you may
forget your original task, which was to get a source file compiled.

This is (IMHO) one major shortcoming of the MacOS interface. If you
want to do something fast, there's no way to do it. If you want to get
into the "Foo:Blah:Bar:Quux:Fap:Blat" folder, you have to click-click-
click-click through all those folders, instead of simply typing "cd
Foo:Blah:...".

	- Vladimir