Re: GnatBench (from GPL edition)

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

John McCabe <john@nospam.assen.demon.co.uk> writes:

> On Thu, 27 Mar 2008 05:07:30 -0400, Stephen Leake
> <Stephe.Leake@nasa.gov> wrote:
>
>>John McCabe <john@nospam.assen.demon.co.uk.nospam> writes:
>>
>>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.

>>(Yes, I know that means I should go all the way and switch to GPS. But
>>Eclipse has far more capability than GPS; it's much closer to Emacs).
>
> Personally I'd avoid GPS. I've only had a little play with it, but two
> things about GPS would put me off...
>
> 1) It's 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.

> 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. 

Since people conflate Ada and ADA and all the other ADA's all the
time, what's a little more?

> 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.

-- 
-- Stephe