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!"

Comments

Re:It still exists?

[PaddyM]

Ada is actually a pretty darn clean language compared to C++ and Ada95 added a lot of object-oriented (gotta have those buzzwords to survive) features without really making the code uglier.

Then again, it's pretty hard to be uglier than C++.

Plus it has support for tasks (think threads) which have been in the spec since '83. Ahem, as long as the *cough* compiler *cough* works.

Ada uses (a = b) instead of (a==b) (worst idea ever). Assignment is ":=". It has "and then" and "or else" for explicit short circuiting.
It uses "begin" and "end" instead of "{" and "}", but the "end" supports an optional additional argument which must be the name of the function or loop (you can label loops). You can call a function like this:
blah(a=>1, b=>2, c=>3) where a, b, and c are presumably the names of the arguments in the function's spec. They can be in a different order. But this way, the compiler will check if you have any arguments missing.

It's strongly typed, so it's very helpful at finding bugs at compile time. And Ada has a powerful package system to support data encapsulation. And I love the way Ada's syntax works for generics (templates).

Probably it's bane is the fact that it is case-insensitive. Which is really a shame, but that's probably the reason why it will die.

Re: It still exists?

[Black Parrot]

> Ada, eh? I sincerly thought that this language was dead, along with Lisp, Fortran
and Cobol, the other dead dinosaurs-era "programming" languages.

I suppose you're trolling, but in case you aren't...

The current Ada standard is Ada 95, 7 years old. A standard for Ada 0x is under development right now.

There's a surprising lot of stuff going on in the Ada world right now. An Ada compiler will be integrated with GCC starting with version 3.1 (as an optional component, actually, as with Fortran). Also, the new GNU Visual Debugger is written in Ada; it supports languages on a plug-in basis, with plugins currently available for C, C++, and (of course) Ada.

Part of what's driving things like GPS and GVD is the maturation of GtkAda, a "thick" Ada binding of GTK+. This is a very polished free {beer,speech} product: it comes with 475 pages of PostScript documentation. (The bindings are also fully OO.)

I won't bother commenting on the pros and cons of Ada as a language, since everyone knows "My language is best!" -- regardless of who the speaker is.