Re: gnat 2006 and windows vista

[Stephen Leake <stephen_leake@stephe-leake.org>]

"Randy" <abuse@127.0.0.1> writes:

>> If you are not already Eclipse literate, then just try AdaGide.

Or Emacs. I believe the latest Emacs snapshot works with Vista
(http://ourcomments.org/cgi-bin/emacsw32-dl-latest.pl).

I have not heard any comments on whether the GNAT Ada compiler works
with Vista, but I'd be surprised if it does not. 

> No, don't know eclipse yet, I knew C and C++ and a few others from
> many years ago but i not done any kind of programing in quite some
> time.  

Eclipse, GPS, AdaGide and Emacs are Integrated Development
Environments (IDE); editors for writing, compiling, debugging
software.

C, C++, Ada are languages; there are several compilers and debuggers
for each language.

Microsoft and other vendors would like you to believe that a
particular language _requires_ a particular IDE and compiler, but it
is _not_ true.

Emacs, GPS, and Eclipse all provide multi-language, multi-compiler
environments. AdaGide is a much simpler system that only works with
Ada, and mostly only the GNAT Ada compiler.

Emacs and GPS are fully Free Software. Eclipse is written in Java,
which is not Free Software (Eclipse itself is open source (I'm not
sure if it's Free), but the Java compiler and runtime are not).

I'm using Free Software in the Free Software Foundation sense
(http://fsf.org). Some people care more about these issues than
others.

Some people consider Eclipse to be more "modern" than Emacs, but Emacs
is actively maintained/improved, and they are equally powerful.

> I heard of ada some time ago but it was kinda hard to get more
> information. Now I have some old books and a new one and I have some
> time on my hands so I thought it would be a good thing to look into
> it. Though it was (most likely) not the best move I got the new
> windows and now I have some troubles <sigh> but thanks for the
> information! Glad to have someone willing to help out, kinda hard to
> find now a days. thanks again Randy

AdaGide is designed for beginners, so that is probably a good place to
start. Just keep in mind that there are more powerful environments,
once you start hitting the limitations of AdaGide.

-- 
-- Stephe