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New GNAT IDE Released
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."
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...?
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.
:wq
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.
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
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
... 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.