Re: Ada95 OOP Questions

[cm@mihalis.demon.co.uk (Chris Morgan)]

In article <dewar.839329517@schonberg> dewar@cs.nyu.edu (Robert Dewar) writes:

   It is hard
   for me to believe that there are Ada environments with no better 
   capabilities than grep for finding things.

You better believe it!

  Without being too specific, a company I used to work for delivered a
1.5 mloc Ada system that was built on VAXes using mostly edt or tpu as
the editor. We didn't even have grep but DCL search is better than
nothing. There were no tools to help you other than these and the
compiler itself (which was not DEC Ada unfortunately). We did have an
old version of DEC LSE for Ada but nobody used it due to various
problems. Not surprisingly use clauses were discouraged in all
deliverable code. In fact the mindset was so prevalent I would find
myself banning use clauses for text_io in my own code.

  Before anyone asks why I nobody bothered to add some PD software for
VAXes, this was a host environment where you weren't really supposed
to even have much in your login.com file, let alone special
software.

  [Oh and I also had a vt terminal only and sometimes could
only get at the target hardware by taking potluck on Saturday
afternoons if the other teams were not using it. Such is the lot of
the poor benighted embedded systems programmer. I digress..]

  Perhaps the response is "that is not an Ada environment". Quite :-)

  Anyway that was then and now I mix and match to suit choosing to use
use for some packages and not for others. There is a middle way of
better readability through renames and use type clauses. I'm still
experimenting with the balance. 

Chris

chris.morgan@baesema.co.uk