Re: The Dreaded "Missing Subunits"

["Randy Brukardt" <randy@rrsoftware.com>]

Robert A Duff wrote in message ...

>Anyway, this all seems rather convoluted.  Why can't the
>compiler/builder automatically determine which compilation units are in
>which files?  Why is a separate tool needed?  And a separate file of
>pragmas Source_File_Name to maintain?


Janus/Ada essentially does this. But there is a chicken & egg problem.

The Janus/Ada compiler doesn't care about naming conventions; only the
make tool does. To help out the make tool, the compiler stores the
source file names in the project when they are compiled. So, you can use
any naming you want, and makes will work fine without any user
intervention.

The problem is the first compile for a piece of source. You can tell the
make tool the naming convention you are using (within limits), but you
have to tell the make tool any names that don't match the convention.
That can get old when someone sends a bunch of files as a bug report
without any obvious naming convention (such as the 8 character
abbreviations noted earlier).

One way to reduce this problem is to integrate this with the IDE (which
is what Rational does, and what we'll do when (if ever) we rewrite the
IDE). But I don't think it can be solved in general.

>Furthermore, none of this mumbo-jumbo would be necessary at all,
>if only all Ada compilers agreed on the file naming convention.

I think that GNAT naming has become a de-facto standard, in that much of
the code that you get is in that format. If you can't handle it, you get
complaints from your customers. (Perhaps other vendors mileage may
vary.)

             Randy Brukardt