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=-1.3 required=5.0 tests=BAYES_00,INVALID_MSGID autolearn=no autolearn_force=no version=3.4.4 X-Google-Language: ENGLISH,ASCII-7-bit X-Google-Thread: 103376,257bb1c458aacca7 X-Google-Attributes: gid103376,public From: dewar@merv.cs.nyu.edu (Robert Dewar) Subject: Re: Ada IDE for Win 95 Date: 1997/03/16 Message-ID: #1/1 X-Deja-AN: 226016833 References: <332A3A2B.57B2@mad.scientist.com> <1997Mar15.073807.1@eisner> Organization: New York University Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada Date: 1997-03-16T00:00:00+00:00 List-Id: Larry said <> One problem is that the term IDE is used rather casually. To me it should refer to something like the Apex environment, where you have a relatively closed system that contains a complete set of tools aimed at effective configuration and control and devlopment of large scale systems. An IDE might or might not have a visual interface of some kind (these are really two quite orthogonal issues -- integrated development environment, and visual interfaces). A lot of people use the phrase IDE to refer to any system, no matter how simple and incomplete, that allows some kind of simple point and click interface for compiling, linking etc. TO me, this is a confusing use of the term, but increasingly that is what it comes to mean. For example, something like the Brighton "IDE" for Windows-95 is a handy little visual interface which may well be of use for beginning students (at which it is aimed), but is not intended, or usable, for serious large scale development (e.g. it does not begin to be a full development environment, and at least in the version I saw, has nothing at all to say about configuration management, which seems to me to be at the heart of any real IDE. On the other hand, one can certainly have an integrated development environmnent that is not point-and-click oriented (indeed I can say for my self that the *only* IDE that would possibly be of interest to me is one which did NOT rely on such an interface, since I consider them useless to me for serious development wor). Now of course there are people who really like visual interfaces and find them effective, and so visual IDE's certainly make a lot of sense for this kind of person. For me, I am always doing six things at once, and I find it clearer to avoid any one of these things fragmenting itself into windows ... for example, I find pmgdb, the PM version of GDB under OS/2 to be very impressive, and you can use it to give very nice demoes of windows popping up with useful stuff, clicking on variables etc, but I personally prefer to use gdb in normal command line mode. As usual, different tools suit different folks. One of the advantages of an open environment like GNAT is that you can tailor the tools you use, and the way you use them, to match your own requirements. Some people in the GNAT group are real EMACS fans, and in particular like the GDB integration that it provides, and the Ada mode stuff, but it's not to my taste -- which is fine, I choose different sets of tools (and indeed no two people in Ada Core Technologies work with exactly the same set of tools, or even on the same machine -- almost everyone is using different machines, everyone uses what they feel most comfortable and productive with). I do worry that we mis train students if we *only* present them with vey simple ways of preparing programs that do not scale up. I think it is fine to have simple systems when you are starting out (and for example, Mike Feldman's simple GNAT interface for DOS seems very nice for starting students), but I don't think this is all they should be introduced to!