[GoLUG] Sorry Kevin

[Steve Litt]

Hi all,

Kevin (Chadwick), I tried my Lint Learning technique on Ada last night,
and it was a failure. Errors and warnings from the compiler itself
were not the slightest bit educational or informative. Truth be told,
it's much easier to learn C with gcc -Wall than to learn Ada with gnat.

Ada's a good language, so before I give up on Lint Learning Ada, do you
know of a way to analyze a simple Ada program and tell what's wrong
from a human point of view instead of the compiler's point of view. To
demonstrate what I mean, see the following comparison between the Ada
and Rust compilers:

============ ADA ================
[slitt at mydesk ada]$ gnat compile empty.adb
gcc -c empty.adb
empty.adb:1:01: error: compilation unit expected
gnatmake: "empty.adb" compilation error
[slitt at mydesk ada]$
=================================

============ RUST ===============
[slitt at mydesk rust]$ rustc empty.rs
error[E0601]: `main` function not found in crate `empty`
  |
  = note: consider adding a `main` function to `empty.rs`

error: aborting due to 1 previous error

For more information about this error, try `rustc --explain E0601`.
[slitt at mydesk rust]$
=================================

Rust gives me a path forward. To somebody familiar with a language,
this sounds like a trivial benefit, but to a guy just learning it can
make the difference between going ninja and giving up. because
in 2026 LLMs still make lots of mistakes.

Kevin, do you know of an Ada lint utility that gives messages one can
learn from?

Thanks,

SteveT

Steve Litt 
http://444domains.com