Re: Compilation in C and ADA

[Francis Belliveau]

Although previous response described how to work around the problem, I believe 
that bit of clarity expansion is needed here with regard to what is actually 
happening.

I am no emacs expert, but from the evidence it seems clear to me that the emacs 
"compile" default is to make an entire application, not just compile a single 
file or the current buffer.

It has been a long time since I used Ada, so I cannot speak to how Ada 
applications are built these days, but I expect "make" can be used to do it.

However, both C and C++ developers commonly use make, or one of its many 
flavors, to describe the dependancies between application sources and how to 
build the applications.  Normally when you compile a C file you get an object 
file, not an executable program.  All the objects for the project, just the one 
in this case, then need to be linked with the appropriate set of libraries in 
order to create the program executable.  Again this is just a simple system 
library in the case of a "hello" application.

Since I do not use the menus either, I do not know what the various choices 
are.  
However, this sounds to me like a "Human Factors" ambiguity problem.  

Either the default for "compile" should be to execute "gcc" rather than "make", 
or the menu command "compile" should be changed to something like "make app".