Re: GnatBench (from GPL edition)

[John McCabe <john@nospam.assen.demon.co.uk.nospam>]

Stephen Leake <Stephe.Leake@nasa.gov> wrote:

>>>I've been tempted to switch to Eclipse from Emacs, mostly because Java
>>>is better for writing structured code than Lisp; I'm getting tired of
>>>fighting obscure Lisp code in Emacs.
>>
>> Oh no - surely not!!! Don't do it Stephe, who'll look after ada-mode
>> :-)

>It will just wither away and die. I think Emacs is headed in that
>direction anyway.

I hope not!

>> 1) [GPS is] phenomenally ugly, at least on Windows where the GTK widgets
>> it uses just don't (in my opinion) look right. Perhaps GPS Pro is
>> better?

>I guess you haven't seen Emacs on Win32? Not "pretty" by any
>standards. But I just ignore that - I'm looking for function over form.

I use Emacs on Win32 on a daily basis! It's still my staple text
editor, as it's far better than anything else I know of!

>> 2) Who uses it outside the Ada world? Can you get full support for
>> Python, Perl, PHP, Ant, Java plug-ins for it, what about ? Are you
>> ever likely to?
>
>Right. That's why I'm considering Eclipse.
>
>> 4) It's got a silly acronym/abbreviation, it's too much like GPS
>> (Global Positioning System)!
>
>That was discussed when it was first announced. It seems AdaCore
>thought the conflation might actually be a good thing, since it would
>generate attention. 

With all due respect to AdaCore (again!), that's a bloody stupid
attitude - try searching for GPS on the net and what do you get!?

>> With all due respect to AdaCore, I do wonder why they ever bothered to
>> create GPS - surely IDEs aren't their core business?

>They were looking to expand. And many people seem to expect a compiler
>to come with a dedicated IDE. I suspect that's partly so they don't
>have to figure out how to tell some other IDE to run the compiler.

They seem to have misjudged things a bit in my opinion; these days
most people (in my experience) expect compilers to provide a means of
plugging in to Eclipse or Visual Studio! (Presumably hence the Hibachi
project!)