Re: S-expression I/O in Ada

[Natasha Kerensikova <lithiumcat@gmail.com>]

On 2010-08-29, Robert A Duff <bobduff@shell01.TheWorld.com> wrote:
> Natasha Kerensikova <lithiumcat@gmail.com> writes:
>> I find compiler issues to be the weakest point of Ada: documentation is
>> pretty well hidden, ...
>
> Heh?  Have you read the GNAT User's Guide, and the GNAT Reference
> Manual?  They should be under some 'doc' directory in your
> GNAT installation.  Or a quick google sends me to:
>
> http://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/index.html#dir
>
> How are these "well hidden"?

Well, let's relatively well hidden compared to its C counterpart, where
I'm only "man gcc" away from the exhaustive list of command-line
switches, or "man whatever_function" away from a standard library
function documentation.

But then it might be more FreeBSD's fault than GNAT's, considering
provided GNAT man pages don't cover Ada stuff, and provided GNAT info
pages are not in info search path. But then calling the user manual info
file "gnat_ugn.info" is quite unintuitive, and the organization of the
info file looks pretty messy (but then again I'm not used to info
pages, and man pages tend to be shorter and more specialized).

>> function Root(From : in Container) return Cursor is
>> begin
>>    return Cursor'(Parent => null, Node => From.Root);
>> end Root;
>
> Nothing wrong with that.  I would probably write
> "return (Parent => null, Node => From.Root);"

I wasn't aware of that even-shorter form. I should really take the time
to read the reference manual (hoping now I've reached the level needed
to understand it).


Thanks for your remarks,
Natasha