Re: Crosspost: Help wanted from comp.compilers

["David C. Hoos" <david.c.hoos.sr@ada95.com>]

I may have missed it, but in all this discussion about unnecessary
recompilation, I have seen no mention of the -m switch for gnatmake, viz.:

-m
Specifies that the minimum necessary amount of recompilations be performed.
In this mode gnatmake ignores time stamp differences when the only
modifications to a source file consist in adding/removing comments, empty
lines, spaces or tabs. This means that if you have changed the comments in a
source file or have simply reformatted it, using this switch will tell
gnatmake not to recompile files that depend on it (provided other sources on
which these files depend have undergone no semantic modifications).

This works wonderfully, and the only drawback is that if a file has been
reformatted and/or comments inserted, the debug line number references will
be wrong.

This is far better than, say, the VADS Ada-83 compiler, which if one
indavertently recompiled a spec (even with no change whatsoever to the
source file), all of the dependents of that spec were rendered out-of-date!


----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Ed Falis" <falis@verizon.net>
Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada
To: <comp.lang.ada@ada.eu.org>
Sent: Thursday, July 17, 2003 1:14 PM
Subject: Re: Crosspost: Help wanted from comp.compilers


> On Thu, 17 Jul 2003 18:02:09 GMT
> tmoran@acm.org wrote:
>
> > > >   That's an example of a case where a textually unchanged spec
> > > >   file
> > > > needs to be recompiled because of a change in compiler options.
> > >
> > > But GNAT doesn't do it, as you yourself point out!
> >   Which is a bug in gnatmake, IMHO.
>
> Use the -s switch to gnatmake if you want that behavior.  How can it be
> considered a bug when it's not defined behavior in the Ada standard, and
> it is in the gnat manuals?
>
> - Ed
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