AdaCAPS Released: July 1995

The GNAT team is happy to announce the first release of AdaCAPS (Ada Computer-Aided Programming System), an interactive development environment (IDE) that works with GNAT (GNU-NYU Ada 95 Translator) under MS-DOS.

Contents

AdaCAPS includes:

a newly-developed editor, programmed with Borland Turbo Vision and using components of the Borland Editor Toolbox. The editor provides full support for multiple re-sizable windows (overlaid or tiled), mouse and keystroke interactions, and single-keystroke invocation of GNAT compilation, binding, and execution commands.

a set of simple DOS command-line commands, gcompile/glink/gexecute, which allow new GNAT users to do simple compilation and linking operations, and to execute programs in an environment that produces a neatly-formatted traceback in case of an unhandled exception. These commands are invoked by AdaCAPS but can also be run outside of AdaCAPS from the DOS command line.

Technical Note

We are doing some tricks here and running GDB (GNU debugger) indirectly. We are providing these commands to help new Ada users and students; advanced users will probably want to turn off the traceback and use GDB directly. - a fast hypertext Ada 95 Reference Manual, produced by Arthur Vargas Lopes, Ulrich Peters, Jerry Dressler, and Rafael Presotto of Porto Alegre Brazil. The help system can be invoked from AdaCAPS or used as a stand-alone program. We are freely distributing binaries with the permission of Dr. Lopes.

Acquiring AdaCAPS by anonymous ftp

The AdaCAPS suite is available from ftp.gwu.edu in the file pub/ada/adacaps/adacaps.zip, and also from NYU and its mirrors, in the file pub/gnat/contrib/gwu/adacaps.zip.

Installation is easy: unzipping the file adacaps.zip (use info-unzip, not pkunzip!) creates a directory adacaps on the current drive and copies the AdaCAPS files there. All you need to do is

(1) add this direcory (for example, c:\adacaps) to your PATH;
(2) set the gw-gnat environment variable, for example
set gw-gnat=c:\adacaps
You can now move to an Ada source code directory and type "adacaps".
Note
This distribution assumes you have already installed GNAT; if you do not yet have GNAT, we are now packaging GNAT with AdaCAPS and GW-GNAT, GW-Ada/Ed-DOS, Ada-Tutor, and AVLAda9X, in a single distribution of zipfiles, together with a menu-driven installer program. This is intended for easy installation from the Ada CD-ROM but is also available by ftp.
This distribution can be found at ftp.gwu.edu, in pub/ada/ez2load.

Developers

AdaCAPS was developed by Ken Price of Priceless Software, Pepperell, Massachusets. Binaries are freely distributable; we regret that Borland's license for Turbo Vision prohibits us from distributing source code.

The DOS commands were developed by Charles Kann, a doctoral student at The George Washington University. He has developed similar simple commands for GNAT under Unix; write us if you are interested in these.

Contact

Prof. Michael B. Feldman Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science The George Washington University Washington, DC 20052 (202) 994-5919 (voice) (202) 994-5296 (fax) mfeldman@seas.gwu.edu (Internet)

This page, whose URL is "http://www.winternet.com/~stachour/ada/adacaps.html", is maintained by Paul Stachour , stachour@winternet.com.
It was last updated on 16 Aug 1995 at 4:15p.m.