[gtkada] (no subject)

[Preben Randhol]

Arnaud Rolly <rolly at free.fr> wrote on 04/07/2000 (10:48) :
> I'm searching an Ada widget (GPL licence, downloadable) that can do :
> - Syntax Highlight
> - Auto-ident
> - Undo/Redo
> On the Web, i found GtkEditor (http://gtkeditor.sourceforge.net/), but there're
> no bindings for Ada. I nobody here can give me a good alternative, i'll use
> c2ada :(

My whish would be that you rather make an IDE that uses ones favourite
editor. Most IDE's suck because the editor is so bad. It takes a lot of
work to make a good editor and I think it is a much more interesting to
make an environment that can interact with the editor than to make a
yet-another-editor-for-an-IDE.

I like vim, others like emacs and yet others like gedit, codecommander
etc... We usually want to use these editors. For example I am very happy
that I can use mutt and slrn with vim to send mail and read news. I think
I would have gone crazy if I had to use a different editor each time I
should send a mail.

What would be very nice would be a program where one can lookup program
syntax, error messages from the compilers etc...

Like if I'm uncertain on how the syntax of an if statement in Ada is I
just lookup if and learn that one can use elsif and don't have to use
parentheses unless ... etc... 

Another very nice thing would be to be able to lookup the definitions of
the packages one use. Say I want to know which parameters a procedure
called Get_Attribute in an XML library, it would have been very nice to
be able to look it up quickly in a small window. One can of course read
the .ads file, but usually one have to find out where the .ads file is
go there and then search through it. 

Long time ago I used Borland C IDE. The only thing I liked was the
ability to lookup things in the help. The editor sucked big time and I
hated it.

So my pledge it that you rather start by thinking if it is possible to
make applications one can use with the editor one wants rather than
start making a new editor.

> Another question : What's the documentation system used with GtkAda ? Is there a
> standardized one ?

I'm also wondering about that.

-- 
Preben Randhol -- [randhol at pvv.org] -- <http://www.pvv.org/~randhol/>
+---+ "There was, I think, never any reason to  believe in any innate
| ! |  superiority of the male, except his superior muscle."
+---+      -- Bertrand Russell, Ideas That Have Harmed Mankind (1950)