If you know me, you know that I program mainly C and Perl, that my preferred editor is Emacs, and that I use mostly Mac OS X for that task.
But, I teach programming, and sometimes I teach programming to students that never heard of Linux or, worse, that never used the command line of Windows. Given this, I tend to search for simple solutions to help them do not deal with the command line so I can use more time for the task of learning how to program.
With that in mind, I decided to suggest a C IDE for windows. The main IDE (I think) is Visual Studio. Although it is paid, there are protocols between Microsoft and the universities to use their software for free for academic purposes. But the Visual Studio installation disc is some hundreds of megabytes. That is not very portable. Also, the application is quite heavy when running. I decided to search for an alternative, and found DevC++. It is just 10 megabytes of download, uses GCC (or MinGW), and works quite well.
It just have one big and stupid problem. Although DevC++ is being developed for more than a decade, their developers did not implement, yet, a pause mechanism for when you are running a console program. In their faq they suggest to add a ‘system(“PAUSE”)’ in the end of the code. That is just stupid! Why to have to add such a line in your code, just during development, and then remove it when you want to ship the application? It would be quite more interesting to have an option in the IDE to force that window not to close. Some other similar applications, like the Lazarus IDE for Pascal, include that option already.
Now I need to decide if I should go back to Visual Studio, if I should explain why DevC++ doesn’t work properly, and explain how to add a pause at the end of the application, of if I should go back and teach students how to test their applications right from the command line.