Re: GnatBench (from GPL edition)

On Mon, 31 Mar 2008 18:12:55 +0200, "Dmitry A. Kazakov"
<mailbox@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

On Mon, 31 Mar 2008 15:23:24 +0100, John McCabe wrote:

the whole GTK+ thing is still, to me, not
quite right on MS Windows.

Yes, but it is getting better.

Because otherwise GPS just follows MS Visual Studio design.

The layout does follow the MS VS design, the look though is of a
rather old version of MS VS, perhaps version 2.0 or 4.0 from the
mid-90s.

Hmm, I know all of them, and I see no any sufficient difference to GPS. In
fact the latest VS is definitely worse, ergonomically, I mean. It
permanently forgets its layout. For instance it kicks off the tray with the
current source column and line numbers. Then it takes hours to get it back,
because the configuration GUI is just typical MS: deeply nested menus and
tabbed dialogs distributed all over the GUI combining properties carefully
selected by a random generator... XML project files is a horror. Automated
compilation (we are heavily using it) never works as expected, etc. File
search which once worked reasonably is ruined now. The only great thing MS
still has, is the debugger. But I am sure, they are working on that! (:-))

I have to agree that, in terms of function, the versions of VS I'm
using now (.NET/2002) and previously (2005), are lacking compared to
VS 6.0. In terms of how they look though, they have improved a bit
over VS 6.0.

The decorations can be changed using a GTK+ RC file. I wonder why AdaCore
didn't do that.

But where AdaCore took time and didn't copy from MS, GPS looks pretty good.
For example, graphical indication of error locations left of the editor
window is a great idea.

Do you mean the bit where the space is used to provide a
representation of the whole file, a rectangle moves up and down to
show which part of the file you're currently viewing, and red blocks
show where the error is?

Yes

That's interesting, but have you seen how the errors and warnings are
shown in Eclipse!

I didn't use Eclipse yet. I know that GPS if far better than VS in that
respect. Though GNAT error messages are better than C++ ones, but they
still are quite useless in many cases. Normally I just look at the source
code lines. An improvement GPS could have is to highlight error slices
(tokens) rather than lines, as well as in the debugger. I remember National
Instruments IDE for CVI compiler which did that.

Take a look at Eclipse. I presume you know Java well enough to have a
play with it. The error stuff is pretty good with Java.

IMO the problems with GPS lie elsewhere. I mean poor design of GTK+ and
GDB.

I'm sure GPS is a perfectly capable tool and is better than nothing
(the whole concept of an IDE that can be used to manage your projects
is quite an advancement from what went before). I don't have any real
gripes with functionality, just form. It seems like AdaCore have put a
fair amount of effort into something that is ever so slightly
pointless!

They probably wanted to be independent on other vendors and unreliable
C/Java mess. The only mistake they probably made was GTK+, which is still C
and still a mess.

LOL!!

.

Relevant Pages

  • Re: GnatBench (from GPL edition)
    ... quite right on MS Windows. ... Hmm, I know all of them, and I see no any sufficient difference to GPS. ... permanently forgets its layout. ... C/Java mess. ...
    (comp.lang.ada)
  • Re: help with setting up NTP on windows with a USB GPS
    ... On reason for me writing my Web page was that I felt a similar level of ignorance about FreeBSD, so I hoped it would help. ... Dave Baxter. ... Having said that, it's working here on Windows 2000, Windows XP, and Windows-7, and I would be rather surprised if it didn't work on Windows Vista as well. ... On my own system, I found that the PPS line worked directly to RS232 without any buffering, indeed I have a GPS 18 LVC feeding two RS232 ports in parallel. ...
    (comp.protocols.time.ntp)
  • Re: Newsreader program
    ... on Unix. ... MS will continue to sell Windows to corporate users, who will merely throw additional money at the problems created by MS. ... Besides, if Linux becomes everything Windows is, it will end up sucking as much as Windows, while merely costing less -- and then everybody will use it, and it will become the main security target. ... Have you considered hacking away at a PDA GPS unit, such as the Garmin iQue 3600? ...
    (rec.outdoors.rv-travel)
  • Re: Eclipse & gnatbench
    ... internal Eclipse file association preferences are updated to associate ... the .ada extension with the GNATbench Ada editor (in addition to .ads ... Incidentally, have you used GPS? ... GNATbench is that they can both use the same .gpr file. ...
    (comp.lang.ada)
  • Re: Feasibility of using Ada in new development
    ... > If you read my post again, you'll see that I am contrasting GPS to ... > .Net, Eclipse, and Borland tools. ... Ada Core is not charging for the toolset; ... If you feel you don't need support, ...
    (comp.lang.ada)