Re: Compilation in C and ADA

[Francis Belliveau <f.belliveau@comcast.net>]

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".