Re: some trivial questions?

[Simon Wright <simon@pushface.org>]

"Dmitry A. Kazakov" <mailbox@dmitry-kazakov.de> writes:

> It is historically so and also there is a great unjustified sentiment
> against "use" in Ada community.

Have you ever tried to work out how GNAT does something from its
internals? (I don't mean the libraries, but the compiler itself).

AdaCore used to use the rename-package-as-abbreviation pattern a lot,

   package SSE renames System.Storage_Elements;

which helped a little once you got used to the standard abbreviations.

I did in fact work out that you can write a post-facto GPR to help
explore the compiler's internals: e.g.

   project Gcc_8 is

      for Source_Dirs use ("gcc-8-20170528-build/gcc/ada",
                           "gcc-8-20170528/gcc/ada");
      for Object_Dir use "gcc-8-20170528-build/gcc/ada";
      for Languages use ("Ada", "C");

   end Gcc_8;

(I'm not 100% sure this would work as-is with the latest structure,
because the compiler itself uses the RTS, and the RTS sources are now in
gcc/ada/lib{gnat,gnarl}).