Re: An Ada advocacy method

[Dmitry A. Kazakov <mailbox@dmitry-kazakov.de>]

On Tue, 02 Sep 2003 12:32:19 GMT, Marin David Condic
<nobody@noplace.com> wrote:

>O.K. Just one observation. I didn't say it was F1 nor do I even really 
>recall what the "real" key sequence was.

F1 for help, right click for "go to definition", "go to declaration".
It was nice in the earlier versions because the help system was small
and integrated into the compiler. Then they moved it to MSDN to add
annoying bells and whistles, and more importantly, to force you to
have an IE. So it became extremely slow and quite out of context.
Then, to push dot-net, they made it incompatible with MSVC 6.0 (and
even slower, not an easy task on a 2GHz CPU, but they managed it). Now
to get help you have to buy C++.NET, which has exactly the SAME buggy
compiler, but with a help available!

This is a SUCCESSFUL BUSINESS MODEL, no joke!

> (I was in "Hypothetical" mode) 
>Maybe it was double-click. Maybe it was right-mouse-click. Whatever. The 
>key point was that if you needed help with some MFC or other MSVC++ 
>supplied subroutine, you could get to it fairly easily and it was a good 
>distance away from useless information.

True, but also note, all this was and is available under VMS in the
LSE editor. Which did not save DEC, rather the opposite. At the same
time, as DEC was fading, Microsoft became extremely successful with
MS-DOS having virtually everything awful, anything you might point at
was. Remeber MS-DOS help? BTW I am missing it much. (:-)) Try to
figure out the syntax of the shell's command FOR in the terabytes of
MSDN trash.

> Perhaps it has degenerated since 
>last I used it.

They learned DEC's lesson well. See above (:-))

>That would be a shame. If someone is building an Ada 
>IDE, something like this would be a really important feature - 
>especially if a library is supplied.

Absolutely right.

Another important feature is hyper-linked error messages. A click to
an error should browse not only the source code, but also ARM. It is
already a good style for a compiler to give an ARM reference, so it
should be relatively easy to implement.

---
Regards,
Dmitry Kazakov
www.dmitry-kazakov.de