David, have you thought about using an existing editor?

David, have you thought about using an existing editor?

[Hubert]

@ David Botton

I have been following your posts about your idea for a IDE for Ada. I 
was thinking about somehting like that myself but was quickly 
discouraged because of the huge amount of work that this would be.

I don't know what your plans are but have you thought about using an 
existing editor for the text edit part and only do the stuff around it? 
I checked out the new SlickEdit recentlyand although it is a comercial 
product and people would have to buy it, it is not bad for Ada. the text 
editor is very good and it also has an Ada browser that drills down from 
the package level and works similar to a Class browser in Visual Studio.

The problem there is that the part of SlickEdit that sets up the tool 
chain and what is supposed to be the integrated GDB front end is really 
cumbersome to use. I wasn't able to make the GDB version that comes with 
GPS work with SlickEdit and setting up a new project is also a pain in 
the butt.

Maybe if you wrote tools that simplify those tasks it would be more 
efficient since you would not have to deal with writing an editor. also, 
perhaps you could strike a deal with the SlickEdit company to have your 
stuff integrated in their product to make it a better environment for Ada.


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Re: David, have you thought about using an existing editor?

[David Botton]

> I checked out the new SlickEdit recentlyand although it is a comercial 
> product and people would have to buy it, it is not bad for Ada.

If they wish to hire me for the project sure, but on my dime I support open source :)

Also, much of the actual text editing portion for the Gnoga IDE is being provided by the Ace Editor JS component, what I am adding on is providing things like code browsing, documentation, context sensitive code completion, etc. and since a Gnoga app the IDE can be run local or remote making it easy to develop off servers using Chrome books for example, etc.

If I would though build off am existing editor it would have been GPS. I'm not completely adverse to that idea, in the end GPS is GPL.

David Botton

Re: David, have you thought about using an existing editor?

[Randy Brukardt]

"Hubert" <herrdoktor@fumanchu.com> wrote in message 
news:xvCvw.1015500$Ub6.871244@fx20.iad...
>@ David Botton
>
> I have been following your posts about your idea for a IDE for Ada. I was 
> thinking about somehting like that myself but was quickly discouraged 
> because of the huge amount of work that this would be.

Writing an visual editor is not a "huge amount of work". I've written more 
than a dozen of them over the years, including one for CP/M written in Z80 
assembler (RED), and our MS-DOS TUI editor for Janus/Ada (JAWS). Plus the 
entire "SLED" series of sample programs for Claw, building editors three 
different ways. In modern systems, most of the complex edit stuff will be 
available in some form in your GUI toolkit. (No one is going to build a GUI 
from scratch today, as I had to with RED and the original JAWS.)

What's a lot of work is all of the Ada-specific stuff that one would want: 
auto-indentation, syntax colorization, project management interfacing, build 
management, and so on. And very little of that would appear in any useful 
sense in some existing system. Even that which did would have to be bent to 
fit into an existing scheme, which is likely to be at least as much work as 
building something that makes sense from a blank slate.

So you're probably right about the amount of work, but wrong that there is 
any sensible way to avoid it.

                                 Randy.

Re: David, have you thought about using an existing editor?

[David Botton]

> So you're probably right about the amount of work, but wrong that there is 
> any sensible way to avoid it.

Bingo.

I do hope that much of what I do can be reused for Emacs or other projects as well.

We will see. Things though are coming along.

David Botton

Re: David, have you thought about using an existing editor?

[Hubert]

The code browser would indeed be the most important part. Right now, 
with GPS, I'm having the problem that everything seems to become "flat" 
for me, its not easy to describe, but with the list of files that all go 
like
A
A.B
A.B.C.D
A.B.C.E

etc it is is so that the bigger part of each filename I see in the 
Project part of GPS is the same sequence of characters and the package 
name appears only in the last section of the filename which makes the 
long list of project filenames indistinguishable from each other because 
the amount of information that is presented is so that about 90% is the 
same and only 10% actually differ.

So I would vote for a browser that does not show the filenames the way 
GPS does it.


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Re: David, have you thought about using an existing editor?

[Hubert]

Oh and another major thing with GPS: It can't show record elements when 
you type a dot for access variables or in a seperate file.

Sorry for bombarding you with these things, but I thought if you're 
working on an editor, I might as well tell you what makes GPS really 
hard to use for a newbie :)


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Re: David, have you thought about using an existing editor?

[Shark8]

On 21-Jan-15 16:16, Hubert wrote:
> The code browser would indeed be the most important part. Right now,
> with GPS, I'm having the problem that everything seems to become "flat"
> for me, its not easy to describe, but with the list of files that all go
> like
> A
> A.B
> A.B.C.D
> A.B.C.E

I think it would be better with a "compilation unit" treeview -- the 
"outline view" is similar, in concept, but limited only to the entities 
of the file you're viewing rather than showing you the structure of your 
units.

Re: David, have you thought about using an existing editor?

[G.B.]

On 22.01.15 01:53, Shark8 wrote:
> On 21-Jan-15 16:16, Hubert wrote:
>> The code browser would indeed be the most important part. Right now,
>> with GPS, I'm having the problem that everything seems to become "flat"
>> for me, its not easy to describe, but with the list of files that all go
>> like
>> A
>> A.B
>> A.B.C.D
>> A.B.C.E
>
> I think it would be better with a "compilation unit" treeview -- the
> "outline view" is similar, in concept, but limited only to the entities
> of the file you're viewing rather than showing you the structure of your
> units.

What is it that makes people is fond of trees? Is it Windows™?
Not having seen something less trivial?

A tree basically does not have navigation within it;
it tends to not have any topics other than trivia of files/units;
it is, basically, a list, presented "graphically" with indentation,
that follows mechanically from whatever is used for sorting
things shown in the tree. I can see hardly a non-trivial, programmer
centric aspect that is made available through trees.
They take away from the screen, for something that I'd rather
like to generate ad hoc. (Like "grep -n 'procedure ' *.ad?" in an
editing window. This view then receives a list of results just like
from a compiler, and is used in similar fashion.)

Looking at a tree feels like looking at book shelves, and asking:
"Now, what books do I have at all?"
But this is not how I would find books, let alone learn which
one is relevant and what is in them–which is the interesting part.

Navigation capabilities,
Call graphs,
Object relationships,
aspects such as active types or I/O-related modules,

seem much more helpful to me, in particular if the views
are connected to each other.

Re: David, have you thought about using an existing editor?

[Jean François Martinez]

On Wednesday, January 21, 2015 at 1:35:42 AM UTC+1, Hubert wrote:
> @ David Botton
> 
> I have been following your posts about your idea for a IDE for Ada. I 
> was thinking about somehting like that myself but was quickly 
> discouraged because of the huge amount of work that this would be.
> 

In case you don't like GPS there is Leonid Dullman's Ada Studio http://users1.jabry.com/adastudio/index.html  I haven't tried it but I have it on my agenda since Leonid really deserves some recognition and support.

There was also another guy from the USAF (that USAF) who made an IDE for Ada.  Initially it was Windows only but no more.  Must be listed in AdaIC.  I don't know if it is still maintained.

Jean-François Martinez

Re: David, have you thought about using an existing editor?

[David Botton]

> In case you don't like GPS

If you've followed things, for the most part there isn't a dislike of GPS, but rather there are some discussions about things that could be different, etc. since for the Gnoga project (http://gnoga.com) there is a need for an IDE as part of the GUI builder.

GPS heavily uses Python and ASIS. I have little interest in Python programming (I certainly would be more popular and it would be initially much more profitable writing Gnoga in Python, but I'd like to give Ada a fighting chance for a future beyond a few niche safety critical projects since I enjoy coding in it). Asis is not available for non-license virusing compilers on Windows at the moment, so not an option to use. (Advocacy is about easy of entry cutting out Windows is foolish).

>deserves some recognition and support.

Try first and investigate use, licensing and _proprietary_ layers first, then get back to us ;)

He is also not been very responsive to e-mails, could be language barriers. Certainly he has some nice bindings that if they didn't have proprietary sections and the others parts were under GMGPL, etc. would be interesting to build on.

> There was also another guy from the USAF (that USAF)

Martin's AdaGIDE is a simple old style code editor for Win32, not maintained and very specific to Windows. It is still useful for some if they work only on Windows.

David Botton

Re: David, have you thought about using an existing editor?

[J-P. Rosen]

Le 22/01/2015 14:41, David Botton a écrit :
>> There was also another guy from the USAF (that USAF)
> Martin's AdaGIDE is a simple old style code editor for Win32, not
> maintained and very specific to Windows. It is still useful for some
> if they work only on Windows.

There is also JGrasp (www.jgrasp.org), with interesting diagrams.
-- 
J-P. Rosen
Adalog
2 rue du Docteur Lombard, 92441 Issy-les-Moulineaux CEDEX
Tel: +33 1 45 29 21 52, Fax: +33 1 45 29 25 00
http://www.adalog.fr

Re: David, have you thought about using an existing editor?

[Simon Wright]

"J-P. Rosen" <rosen@adalog.fr> writes:

> There is also JGrasp (www.jgrasp.org), with interesting diagrams.

I had an offer (back in the 20th century) from someone to assist on a
project; he insisted on using JGrasp, which has the property of
completely rewriting the source, which makes it almost impossible to use
any sort of version control system (at least, if you're interested in
what has changed). So I had to turn him down.

Re: David, have you thought about using an existing editor?

[Hubert]

Well others have different life experience and for me a tree allows me 
to dig down from the general view to the detail.

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Re: David, have you thought about using an existing editor?

[Shark8]

On 22-Jan-15 04:06, G.B. wrote:
> What is it that makes people is fond of trees? Is it Windows™?
> Not having seen something less trivial?

Except that a tree-view perfectly fits what I was proposing: 
Illustrating the hierarchy of compilation units in the project (by the 
parent-child relationship). This could easily be a form of navigation 
tied to the structure of the project.

I'm not saying that call-graphs and dependency-graphs and other such 
organizational views aren't needed/wanted/necessary, just that this 
particular one isn't. (You could argue that the file-view panel does, 
but like the post I initially replied to observed, that gets 
useless/frustrating as more and more portions of the file name become 
more and more similar as you go deeper into the hierarchy.)