Re: GnatBench (from GPL edition)

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

"John McCabe" <john@nospam.assen.demon.co.uk.nospam> wrote in message
news:8ijtu314uf1j34hc837qkgtgd4lqbr0q5l@4ax.com...
...
> GPS may be a showcase for GTKAda but, on Windows, I don't think it
> does GTK+ any favours. Look at the screenshot at
>
> https://libre.adacore.com/gps/img/gps_800x600.jpg
>
> Does that, to you, match up with the phrase  "Same modern GUI
> available on all platforms " you can find at
> https://libre.adacore.com/gps/main.html? To me the answer is plainly
> no - that's the sort of GUI you'd be unlucky to get on Windows 3.1!

It surely doesn't look like a Windows 3.1 application, more like Windows 95,
which surely has nothing to do with the 1980s. If you think this is ugly,
you should see the GUI distributed with Janus/Ada...it *is* a Windows 3.1
look, and it is nowhere is nice as this. :-)

And IMHO, Windows 95/98/2000 is still the most professionally looking
interface. The silly eye candy of XP and Vista just waste a lot of time and
effort.

The only complaint I'd have looking at the screenshot is the funny GTK look.
Surely that isn't worth caring about...

> Anyway - I don't develop in Ada any more (unfortunately - with
> caveats!) so it's not really my place to criticise the development
> environments that are available but, it's so difficult for me not to!
> Primarily it's through frustration - I like Eclipse and it's
> frustrating that it has taken so long for the Ada world to get
> something out to allow Eclipse to be used as an industrial strenght
> Ada IDE!

My understanding is that to write Eclipse plugins you have to write in Java.
If I wanted to use Java, I wouldn't be here in the first place. If you can't
program it in Ada, it isn't worth writing.

I understand the market pressures, but on a practical basis, I don't
understand the big deal about bloated IDEs anyway. Everything that is
worthwhile in an IDE is language and compiler-specific anyway (debuggers,
error messages, syntax, symbol browsing, project management), so what can
this empty framework actually accomplish? It seems like just another way to
keep Intel and AMD in business by forcing machine upgrades that aren't
necessary.

                                      Randy.