Re: Looking for Ada source browser

[Ted Dennison<dennison@telepath.com>]

In article <3ADFF58E.285042FF@esa.int>, Joe Wheadon says...
>
>I am looking for an Ada Source Browser, preferably able to run on a
>PC/Windows platform and also Solaris 2.5.1 platform, suitable for
>browsing source code of  projects, each with a few hundred source
>modules spread over a multi-branch project-specific filetree.  Ideal
..
>special capabilities or integration with other tools (eg CM...) are
>needed.  The Browser must be usable independently of any particular
>compiler system.  The Ada is MIL-STD-1815A   Ada83.
>Can someone recommend a good FREE package for this ?

Right now, Emacs is probably the best free solution out there that can edit
sources. It automaticly colorizes identifiers and keywords and such, and allows
you to find declarations for objects automaticly. It is customisable using elisp
(which should be easier than customising a Java app). It comes with elisp
packages targeted to Gnat, but its quite possible to edit those elisp packages
to target any other compiler system.

If you don't require integrated editing, another good option for browsing code
is to use one of the Ada-to-HTML converters. HTML is about as portable as you
can get. There's a fairly nice one that comes with Gnat, but it relies on the
Gnat namings to work properly. There's also a Perl script out there that someone
wrote. I'm working on a portable one based on OpenToken that should hopefully
make the next release. As far as customization goes, the OpenToken solution
would probably be the easiest to deal with (at least, that's my hope).

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