Re: Gnat Ada 9X - What sort of PC does it need???

[dewar@cs.nyu.edu (Robert Dewar)]

If you are restricted to 8+3 file names (either because you are using DOS,
or using OS/2 on a FAT partition, or -- most aggravating of all if you ask
me -- you insist on using a junk editor that does not handle long file names)

you are not completely stuck
instead you can use the -gnatk8 switch when you compile, which uses a
crunching algorithm to crunch file names down to the 8+3 limit. The
associated gnatk8 utility that is part of the GNAT system can be used
to find the crunched name for a unit (although it is quite a simple
algorithm, see source of krunch.adb, and after a while easy to do in
your head).

Of course this does not guarantee uniqueness, and so you might have to
juggle unit names a bit, but in practice it works pretty well, and you
may well find you don't have any name clashes.

of course the other possibility, suitable for educational use, and actually
a convention we follow in GNAT itself, is simply to keep unit names short.
That's not so terrible:

if you use "use" clauses, then you don't often mention unit names anyway,
only in with clauses, so keeping them short does not have a big readability
effect.

if you don't use "use" clauses, then often people resort to doing local
renamings using abbreviated unit names because they can't stand giant
names before the dots. By keeping unit names short, you can use the real
unit names in qualification, which is often clearer.

Anyway, there are two ways of dealing with the "problem" that are a little
less drastic than repartioning the disk or switching editors.

My personal advice if you are using OS/2: probably worth taking the plunge.
Repartition and setup a big HPFS partition, and learn a new editor (I find
epm very nice, but also consider learning EMACS).