Re: GnatBench (from GPL edition)

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

On Mon, 31 Mar 2008 15:23:24 +0100, John McCabe wrote:

> the whole GTK+ thing is still, to me, not
> quite right on MS Windows.

Yes, but it is getting better.
 
>>Because otherwise GPS just follows MS Visual Studio design.
> 
> The layout does follow the MS VS design, the look though is of a
> rather old version of MS VS, perhaps version 2.0 or 4.0 from the
> mid-90s.

Hmm, I know all of them, and I see no any sufficient difference to GPS. In
fact the latest VS is definitely worse, ergonomically, I mean. It
permanently forgets its layout. For instance it kicks off the tray with the
current source column and line numbers. Then it takes hours to get it back,
because the configuration GUI is just typical MS: deeply nested menus and
tabbed dialogs distributed all over the GUI combining properties carefully
selected by a random generator... XML project files is a horror. Automated
compilation (we are heavily using it) never works as expected, etc. File
search which once worked reasonably is ruined now. The only great thing MS
still has, is the debugger. But I am sure, they are working on that! (:-))

>>The decorations can be changed using a GTK+ RC file. I wonder why AdaCore
>>didn't do that.
> 
>>But where AdaCore took time and didn't copy from MS, GPS looks pretty good.
>>For example, graphical indication of error locations left of the editor
>>window is a great idea.
> 
> Do you mean the bit where the space is used to provide a
> representation of the whole file, a rectangle moves up and down to
> show which part of the file you're currently viewing, and red blocks
> show where the error is?

Yes

> That's interesting, but have you seen how the errors and warnings are
> shown in Eclipse!

I didn't use Eclipse yet. I know that GPS if far better than VS in that
respect. Though GNAT error messages are better than C++ ones, but they
still are quite useless in many cases. Normally I just look at the source
code lines. An improvement GPS could have is to highlight error slices
(tokens) rather than lines, as well as in the debugger. I remember National
Instruments IDE for CVI compiler which did that.

>>IMO the problems with GPS lie elsewhere. I mean poor design of GTK+ and
>>GDB.
> 
> I'm sure GPS is a perfectly capable tool and is better than nothing
> (the whole concept of an IDE that can be used to manage your projects
> is quite an advancement from what went before). I don't have any real
> gripes with functionality, just form. It seems like AdaCore have put a
> fair amount of effort into something that is ever so slightly
> pointless!

They probably wanted to be independent on other vendors and unreliable
C/Java mess. The only mistake they probably made was GTK+, which is still C
and still a mess.

-- 
Regards,
Dmitry A. Kazakov
http://www.dmitry-kazakov.de