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ACT Release GTK Based Development Environment
aidan skinner writes: "ACT have a new GTK based IDE out for Ada, C and C++, called GPS. There's a Press
Release, Quick Tour(pdf) and Detailed Tour. It's also apparently editor neutral, so I don't have to give up my beloved emacs... Sweet!"
Actually, it sounds like Ada has a mixture of Pascal syntax, Visual Basic (ugh!) parameter passing possibilities, easy threading as in Java, generic features as C++ and object-oriented features like - well - lots of languages. In fact, from your description it sounds a LOT like Borland Delphi on steroids :-)
Maybe I'm just pulling this out of my a**, but wasn't Ada also designed to make it less difficult to PROVE the correctness of programs? This would be the reason why the US DOD uses Ada a lot in mission-critical systems, and sometimes mandates the use of Ada.
I think the reason for it's lack of popularity is based on a historical lack of platform bindings, and - as you correctly state - bad compilers. Ada *IS* a clean and useful language, but when you can't *DO* much with it, it stops being a viable option.
Black holes are where God divided by zero
What do you really do in this 80-hour week? If you only type code then don't be surprised if your week reduces to 40 hours when switching from C to Ada. And also your programs will most likely be much less error-prone. You will save several hours of debugging time. I have almost not used a debugger after starting to use Ada95 in stead of C/C++.
Other than that if you don't use a editor that is capable of macros, then you should look for a new.
Your comment about Ada shows only how sadly ignorant you are.
I am curious what you think Ada is? Possibilities include the American Dental Association, Americans with Disabilities Act, and Armadillos for Driver Awareness. In fact, Ada is a programming language named after Augusta Ada Byron, Countess of Lovelace. Ada was an assistant to Babbage in the creation of his Difference Engine. Her specialty was mathematics. Her work on the Difference Engine has earned her the honor of being recognized as the world's first computer programmer. I wonder if you would be upset if you saw a product was written in C++ or Java. I suspect not since Eclipse was written in Java. Does a language named after a woman scare you?