New GNAT IDE Released

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Posted by timothy on Sunday July 20, 2003 @06:06PM from the for-all-your-ada-needs dept.

McDoobie writes "Ada Core Technologies has released their new GPS Integrated Development Environment for download. It's intended to be a professional-grade development environment along the lines of Microsoft Visual C++ or Sun's Forte. You can grab it at http://libre.act-europe.fr/gps/. Check it out. You might like it."

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whoops by Anonymous Coward · 2003-07-20 18:44 · Score: 5, Funny

"C/C++ support is not complete"

A natural Visual C++ competitor!
wow, finally! by RedDork · 2003-07-20 19:16 · Score: 5, Funny

If only we had this when I was an undergraduate learning to program on Ada. Instead we were thrown into the mysteries of vi and ADA at the same time, with no hint of the existence of such a thing as an IDE or even a text editor that behaved in some way related to what we were used to. Nothing like learning to program on a language that won't let you compile if you have a few spaces in the wrong place, and a text editor that is even more baffling at first glance. My lab TA thought I was a natural programmer since I was always done first. In actuality, I was the first person to figure out that we had ftp access and to download then damn files and edit it on windows . I'm sorry, but vi never made any sense to me. Maybe that's why I'm in law school now
1. Re:wow, finally! by p2sam · 2003-07-20 20:44 · Score: 1
  
  the language of the law is no more readable than most languages of computer programming.
2. Re:wow, finally! by slowdive1979 · 2003-07-20 21:44 · Score: 2, Interesting
  
  actually, it's not too poor of a programming language, at least as of Ada95 it wasn't. it's fairly tolerant of white space and is not case sensitive. it protects you from going outside arrays and similar programming glitches that are easy to miss and easily crash your program. it also handles multi-threaded programs very easily. finally, if there is something you want to do at a low level, or if you want to use C, it's fairly easy to turn off the protections or import a chunk of code.
  
  as far as editing goes, i always used emacs. with a decently configured lisp file, it will format the text according to what part of the program you are in or whether or a word is a variable or a command or what not. or there was the windows program adagide, which did all of this as well. i guess it's all in what you are used to, and what tool are at your disposal. :wq
3. Re:wow, finally! by putaro · 2003-07-21 02:21 · Score: 1
  
  Ha, you think you had it bad? Back when I was in college, after trudging through 2 miles of snow (ok, sand - I went to UCSD) we had to "hand compile" our Ada code into Pascal because the Prof's super special Ada compiler used to crash the VAX (this was 1987, I think). We all gave up and just made the Pascal work and then "disassembled" it into Ada. What a waste of time.
4. Re:wow, finally! by Anonymous Coward · 2003-07-21 02:25 · Score: 1, Interesting
  
  You mean you had a class on ADA??? We never had any such thing...just assignments and concept classes. You taught yourself whatever language you felt like to do the project. But, of course, that made us all very good programmers because we had to learn how to learn as well as how to learn from each other.
  
  ADA had some good concepts, but didn't take away the main reason programmers made crashy programs with C and ADA: nobody wants to plan their data ahead of time. I don't want to worry about whether the thing I'm working on takes 4 bytes or 8. Just store this thing and shutup about it. That's why Perl and Python exist. You have a variable and that's it. You don't care how big it is, only about what is done to it and its relationship to other things.
  
  As far as editing, with VI you don't use spaces for indenting, you use tabs. Then, you can tell VI how much space to use for tabs when displaying the text. You can make the code look like whatever you want this way and always have the right number of spaces.
  
  VI is okay, but VIM is better. At my school there was quite a competition as to whether Emacs or VIM were better. VIM won out because it required fewer keystrokes to perform the same operations. Using the mouse is time consuming because your hands leave the keyboard. Emacs and windows work for beginners, but the speediest editer will be the touch typist familier with VIM.
  
  John
5. Re:wow, finally! by Anonymous Coward · 2003-07-21 17:32 · Score: 0
  
  You can't be serious. All the vi keybindings are longer--it takes two keystrokes just to get in and out of beep mode. In Emacs damn near every key combination does something useful; while it has mouse support too, I can't remember the last time I actually used it.
So, why "GPS" already?!? by ivi · 2003-07-20 21:02 · Score: 1, Interesting

I wonder if their acronym is there to increase
the number of hits, for reasons beyond me, from
the users/developers of GPS (Global Positioning
Systems) with rather different semantics...?
1. Re:So, why "GPS" already?!? by turpie · 2003-07-22 19:22 · Score: 1
  
  I couldn't agree more, its not like GPS (the nav system) is some obscure thing that no ones ever heard of.
  What kind of retard would give their project a name that so easily confuses it something completely unrelated.
2. Re:So, why "GPS" already?!? by McDoobie · 2003-07-23 09:13 · Score: 1
  
  Ummm....It's an acronym for "GNAT Compilation System" .
  
  It's more than just an IDE.
3. Re:So, why "GPS" already?!? by turpie · 2003-07-23 14:33 · Score: 1
  
  I think you mean "GNAT Programming System."
  
  But why then did they choose those three words?
  Why not something that abbreviated to something less common?
  What about GPE (GNAT Programming Environment) a simple one word change, though there are still other GPE projects.
  If you go beyond three letters you could use GNATAPS "GNAT Advanced Programming System." which gives zero results from google.
  
  The big problem with using an acronym as common as GPS is when people start trying to search for help from other websites, they will have to weed through millions of unrelated webpages.
  With a little bit of extra thought they could have made their project much easier to find.
4. Re:So, why "GPS" already?!? by McDoobie · 2003-07-23 19:21 · Score: 1
  
  I think you mean "GNAT Programming System."
  
  Yes I do. Sorry. Was in a bit of a rush.
  
  As to why they picked "GPS", you'd have to ask them.
  
  They could have used GNU Ada Programming Environment too I suppose. I suppose theres a dozen other combinations they could have went with also. Maybe GPS is quicker to type. Heh.
  
  McDoobie
Wow... by Randolpho · 2003-07-21 02:45 · Score: 4, Insightful

Lots of nifty features.I especially like the version control options (not just CVS, but several others, apparently), the program entities graph, and the call graph. Very nifty tools; if only I could get them on eclipse! :)

--
"Times have not become more violent. They have just become more televised."
-Marilyn Manson
Don't forget Dev-C++ by brianjcain · 2003-07-21 03:37 · Score: 1

Dev-C++ is an open source IDE worth trying.
1. Re:Don't forget Dev-C++ by leifm · 2003-07-21 03:45 · Score: 2, Interesting
  
  I like Dev-C++ a lot. I am taking C++ in school this semester and have been using it because I have no access to VC++ at work, and it's great. Actually as far as I can tell if you aren't doing C++ dev that is Windows specific there would be no reason to choose VC++ over Dev-C++.
  
  --
  
  "Windows Me offers tremendous reliability and stability improvements..." -- Paul Thurott
2. Re:Don't forget Dev-C++ by __past__ · 2003-07-21 05:26 · Score: 3, Insightful
  
  For some reason, I doubt that Dev-C++, "a full-featured IDE for Win32" would be a good alternative when you are looking for a cross-platform Ada IDE.
  
  --
  Programming can be fun again. Film at 11.
The GUI by LeftOfCentre · 2003-07-21 10:37 · Score: 1

I really hate non-standard GUIs -- I want everything to look and feel like the host platform and this IDE definitely does not. Also, as others have noted, C/C++ is not yet supported. Otherwise it seems pretty impressive.
Am I alone here? by Anonymous Coward · 2003-07-21 12:23 · Score: 0

In no other field is the gigantic Swiss army knife approach to tools encouraged. EEs do not have a combination board layout system, soldering iron, multi meter, board etcher etc. Auto mechanics do not use crescent wrenches. Everybody has a set of specialized tools. Yet in software they want to cram it all together into one gigantic "integrated" system. While this may be great for getting mom to write a program, these are not the tools of professionals. Give me a good editor (I use Emacs when I can), a compiler, a linker, a make facility, a code repository, and some kind of a debugger. Text is just fine.
While I have a small bit of effort to set a project up, I know what is going on. Hiding the details of how software is constructed only keeps people from ever learning beyond the "I press this button and after that it's magic" stage.

Sorry for the rant.
Can it edit/understand VHDL? by PaulBu · 2003-07-21 12:41 · Score: 2, Interesting

... after all, syntactically VHDL is an Ada derivative.

It would be an interesting thing for them to
expand into an open-source VHDL design tool.

Remember, now for a $100-$200 one can buy an FPGA
evaluation board from, say, Xilinx, they would
give you a (closed-source, I guess) compiler to
compile from VHDL to an FPGA bin file, you load
that into the board through a parport and here it
is, fully custom electronic gadget!

Paul B.
1. Re:Can it edit/understand VHDL? by McDoobie · 2003-07-21 13:25 · Score: 2, Informative
  
  I beleive Ada Core Technologies does provide tools for some aspects of VHDL design. I think thier commercial GPS offering has tools that support this. I'm not certain though. You'd have to e-mail them for specifics.
  
  GPS does offer extensive support for controlling the details of the compile/link process, which I assume is important for the VHDL arena.
  
  McDoobie