PowerAda Introduction

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The PowerAda Demo programs are designed to walk you through several program development scenarios to acquaint you with the basic PowerAda features. We recommend that you try the Getting Started demo before trying anything else. Once you have completed the Getting Started demo, you may wish to apply PowerAda to an Ada program of your own, or proceed to a more advanced demo. For a more complete overview of the PowerAda tools and development = See Chapter 3, "Basic PowerAda Concepts", and Chapter 4, "The PowerAda Development Environment".

The demos are:

In addition, there is a section on Basic Troubleshooting.

Copy and Paste

Throughout the PowerAda demos, you may be required to enter text at the command line or in a dialog box. If you are following these tutorials via on-line help, you can save yourself some typing by using the X-Windows "copy and paste" procedure: click at the beginning of the text you wish to copy, using the left button of your mouse. While holding down the left mouse button, drag the pointer over the text to be copied. Release the mouse button, move the pointer to the window you wish to "paste" into, and press the middle mouse button. The text will appear there exactly as if you had typed it. Try this on the following harmless command; copy it from here into a command window:

echo Hello!

Unfortunately, if you are following from the written documentation, you will have to type everything in yourself!

Required Setup

If you are already running the powerada navigator, then you can go right to the Getting Started Demo. If you haven't started powerada, then here's your chance.

The first step in using PowerAda for anything, including just reading the on-line help, is execution of the PowerAda setup file. On many systems the setup script is run automatically for each user by a login script or profile. To check if PowerAda is already set up type the following command:

echo $POWERADA

If nothing but a blank line is echoed to the terminal then the setup script has not been run. In this case, follow the instructions described in Chapter 2, "Setting up a User Account to Use Ada", then come back.

When you start powerada (the primary tool in PowerAda), you need to open or create a project. We'll give you a head-start by creating a working project relative to the $POWERADA/demos baseline project. The working project need only be created once and can be reused for all the demos. If you have not created the working project type the following command (or cut and paste it):

. $POWERADA/demos/setup

The setup script creates a temporary directory, moves you down into it, and then makes a new working project using the PowerAda demo project as a baseline.

You are now ready to perform the PowerAda demos.