Re: GNAT for MS Visual Studio

["Randy Brukardt" <randy@rrsoftware.com>]

"William J Thomas" <wjthomas@wcvt.com> wrote in message
news:13f3e0vbb05s47c@corp.supernews.com...
...
> No MS Visual Studio GUI building capability.
>
> Tell me is there some secret government agency out there preventing Ada
from
> having a good, reliable GUI builder on MS Windows?

I doubt that, I think it is more that many of us can't figure out precisely
what such a tool would offer over the tried-and-true command line tools.
(Yes, I do the vast majority of my programming from an MS-DOS window using
the same 1980s editor I've always used.) Sure, I can imagine some really
neat features, but those would be impractical (lousy response time,
unrealistic requirements, probably would need an incremental Ada compiler to
implement them).

We've seriously looked at this issue, and concluded that a decent
programming environment would take more than 3 man-years to create: longer
than implementing the majority of the Amendment changes to the language. And
only a few people would want to use it (me, and possibly you, and I don't
know of any others.), because they all want Visual Studio or Eclipse or
something else that isn't designed to work with Ada. As such, there is no
possibility of recouping the investment in time and money, so I think you'll
be waiting essentially forever on that one. (We are working on a simple
Windows programming environment, but it will not have anything fancy; it is
aimed simply to make our compiler more usable to those who can't handle a
command line. And the only reason we're doing that is that we can't update
the one we have currently - no source code.)

                                        Randy.