Re: Access procedure to pointer

[Stephen Leake <Stephe.Leake@nasa.gov>]

S�bastien <seb.morand@gmail.com> writes:

>> You could read the .ads files. They are well written and concise. I
>> don't see what other form of documentation would be much better. 
>
> I can and I do, but just because I don't have any choice. Of course
> Ada is easy to read, but there is no hyperlink navigation, 

As others have mentioned, any decent Ada IDE will provide hyperlinks
from the source. If the IDE can parse the GNAT .ali files, so much the
better. 

> this is quite boring. For instance you find out a function, let's
> say the documentation is clear, yes but ada is strongly typed and
> then have a lot of new type in order to assure safety and quality of
> the code. So you have then to find the definition of the type and so
> on...

Yes. In Emacs Ada mode, that's what C-c C-d is for.

> Documentation is the most important part of any technology. 

Only for people who haven't learned it yet :).

>> You mention javadoc in another post. That's just a massaged form of
>> comments and code from java source code. In java, that makes sense,
>> because there is no separation of interface from implementation (no
>> analogy of .ads vs .adb). So reading the java source files is tedious
>> and confusing, if all you want is a list of functions you could call.
>> For Ada, that's simply not necessary; .ads files serve the same
>> purpose, without needing a separate tool. 
>
> I completly disagree, even if ada source code is far easier to read
> than any other language. See remarks above.

The only thing you mentioned that javadoc has that plain Ada source
doesn't have is hyperlinks; that's a solved problem.

> Moreover, a document should hide the implementation detail in order to
> be clearer and more concise. In ada, ads and adb are often in the same
> directory in all installation I tried, so it's not really helping.

Hmm. I guess if you grep *.ad? that would be a problem. But that's
what grep *.ads is for. Why, specifically, is it a problem that the
*.ads and *.adb are in the same directory?

> Moreover no documentation means no index or any stuff like that, 

True, no index. Others have pointed out that the GNAT manual does have
an index for the GNAT packages that are supposed to be available to
the user. As Robert Dewar would say "please read the super-secret
documentation". 

> no search form to find all the files that could be usefull for you.

grep "foo" *.ads ?

What, specifically, is wrong with that?

> At least, the name of the file in ada distribution are not really
> meaningful, s-interr.ads does not mean anything to me.

That's true. That one you'll have to blame on Bill Gates, not Ada or
AdaCore. Although I think it's time AdaCore gave up ISO CDROM
compatibility and convert to long file names.

You can run gnatchop on the files to get long filenames, but that's
cheating. 

-- 
-- Stephe