Gnat Pro – Designed for the Ada Professional
Integral to GNAT Pro are the consulting and support services we provide to our customers. While every company says they offer excellent support, for us it’s a critical part of our business model and something we take very seriously.
Featured AdaCore Expert
Quentin Ochem
Senior Engineer
In 2000 I began my studies at IUT Aix en Provence which is where I learned Ada. In my third year, I took the opportunity to do an internship at AdaCore Paris where I joined the GPS team (in the early days before the tool was even released). I implemented the initial version of the auto-fix feature at that time. I then received my degree in computer science at ESIL, an engineering school in Marseille. My graduating internship was again at AdaCore, this time in NY, where I was involved in the initial study of the Eclipse IDE, and worked on the development of GNATbench (our plug-in technology for Eclipse). I joined the company directly after my internship and continue to work on GPS and GNATbench. I’m also very involved with our Ada-Java interfacing technology and our training program.
What does “Frontline Support” mean to you?
For me, Frontline Support is a unique way to communicate with customers, to better understand their needs and the way they work. It’s more than just answering questions, it actually helps me to orient the day to day development of our software. It’s also an extraordinary opportunity to find out how the work I am doing is helping our customers and learn what can be improved.
What drew you to Ada?
I discovered programming languages on my own when I was 16, when I started to play with Quick Basic, Visual Basic, C++ and a little bit of Java. When I started to study computer science, I was already aware of the main concepts of modern programming languages (modularity, pointers, OOP and such) and wondered why my teachers were starting to teach me a language that was only used in some old space rockets. From the first lesson, I went from skeptic to a passionate defender of the Ada language. Of all the languages that I’ve worked with, Ada is the one that allows the programmer to express most things in the actual program – not in comments – and hence allows the compiler to enforce high-level descriptions. With that high-level of programming comes a surprising number of benefits. Attributes is the first one that springs to mind. Here’s something that you have to do guesswork with in most languages (C is a very good example of that). How to translate a value back and forth to a string? What are the constraints of a type? Ada incorporates many functionalities through attributes, whereas many other languages do not and force the developer either to rely on libraries, or to write their own
What’s your favorite feature of GNAT Pro Technology
I’m a fan of the smart-completion feature of GNATbench / GPS. It’s something I’ve been working on a lot. Being on a Java project, I was completely addicted to this feature and was feeling lost when programming in an environment without it. Now, I’ve got pretty much the same reactivity on Java and Ada, and that gives me a huge boost in my productivity.