Re: Inspirels Ada on cortex tutorial linker issue

[Nicolas Colin Paul de Gloucester <wirklich@nicht.at>]

|-----------------------------------------------------------------------|
|"On Monday, August 29, 2016 at 1:49:23 PM UTC-4, Nicholas Colin Paul de|
|Gloucester wrote:                                                      |
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|Thay may be nice, but they are also out-of-the-language means.         |
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|Uh, when I use a text editor to create Ada source files, then call     |
|gnatmake on the main program, I don't need to know anything about      |
|makefiles, pre-processor commands to mix in with my source, linker     |
|commands to bring in math libraries or whatever.  [. . .] All in all,  |
|much, much better than other languages where moving an application     |
|from one compiler to another for the same target can take weeks.       |
|                                                                       |
|[. . .]"                                                               |
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Hello:

When I run  gnatmake  it invokes none of PowerAda and Janus/Ada and
Ada Magic. It invokes GNAT. For example,  out_of_the_language.ada  is
a file that contains a legal Ada program. GNATMake refuses to compile
it.

cat out_of_the_language.ada
package Out_Of_The_Language is
   type Out_Of_The_Language_Type is (True, False);
   function Predicate return Out_Of_The_Language_Type;
end Out_Of_The_Language;
package body Out_Of_The_Language is
   function Predicate return Out_Of_The_Language_Type is
      Disagreement : Out_Of_The_Language_Type := True;
   begin
      return Disagreement;
   end Predicate;
end Out_Of_The_Language;
 /home/gloucester/out_of_the_language/single_file $ gnatmake
 out_of_the_language.ada
gcc-4.9 -c -x ada out_of_the_language.ada
out_of_the_language.ada:5:01: end of file expected, file can have only
one compilation unit
gnatmake: "out_of_the_language.ada" compilation error

GNATChop is also out of the language and it provides a workaround.

 /home/gloucester/out_of_the_language/single_file $ mkdir ../GNATChop
 /home/gloucester/out_of_the_language/single_file $ gnatchop
 out_of_the_language.ada ../GNATChop
splitting out_of_the_language.ada into:
   ../GNATChop/out_of_the_language.ads
   ../GNATChop/out_of_the_language.adb

A person who knows everything about Ada and nothing about GNAT can
"use a text editor to create Ada source files" - e.g.
out_of_the_language.ada  - but cannot then merely "call gnatmake on
the main program". Invoking the GNATChop "pre-processor" might be a
step between "a text editor" and "gnatmake".

No person needs to "know anything about makefiles" for a language
(whether Ada or not Ada). A compiler for a language may be (and in
many cases is) impractical without something like GNATMake (and
GNATMake is much better than Make), but "makefiles" are also out of
those languages.

With kind regards,
Nicholas Collin Paul de Gloucester