Re: IDE's that support ADA

[Adam Beneschan <adambeneschan@gmail.com>]

On Wednesday, October 29, 2014 4:28:59 PM UTC-7, Peter Chapin wrote:

> Well Eclipse has a 'change method signature' refactoring option. It 
> changes the signature of a method and all its overrides. It can also keep 
> the original method and have it delegate to the new method (and mark the 
> original as depreciated).
> 
> > - something else?
> 
> I'm looking at the refactor menu in Eclipse... there is an option to 
> convert a local variable of a method into a field of the class. So in Ada 
> terms that would be promoting a local variable of a primitive subprogram 
> to a component of the tagged type.
> 
> Eclipse also has refactorings to move methods from super classes to 
> subclasses (or vice-versa). In Ada terms we are talking about moving 
> subprograms from one package to another, with suitable renamings I guess.
> 
> There is also an extract interface refactoring that examines a class and 
> generates an interface based on the methods it finds there.
> 
> There are other refactorings too, but you get the idea. Of course we are 
> talking about Java here so the ones I mentioned are all OOP specific. One 
> might be able to come up with other, Ada specific, possibilities.

One thing I've sometimes found useful in Eclipse is Extract Method, where I can highlight a part of a method (function) and it will figure out how to take the highlighted part and turn it into a separate method with a name it prompts me for.  It does a reasonable job of guessing what parameters I'd like to pass to it, and what function result I want, if any.  Something like this is very difficult to get right all the time, and I wish it gave me more options to customize when it guesses wrong.  At that point, all I can do is cancel the operation and then do the refactoring by hand.  But even if it works, say, 60% of the time, it really does help in those 60% of cases and it's not much of an extra burden to try it in the other 40%.

                                 -- Adam