The primary purpose of this Workshop is to address a framework to support the development of ASIS Extensions for higher level abstractions.

The primary focus of the Ada Semantic Interface Specification (ASIS) Working Group and ASIS Rapporteur Group has been to evolve ASIS as an interface to the Ada 95 compilation environment. ASIS now provides a powerful mechanism to perform code analysis for mission-critical, high-integrity, and safety-critical applications. A variety of highly effective tools have been built using ASIS. This interface was approved as an ISO standard in 1999 and is known as:

ISO/IEC 15291:1999 Information technology
 * Programming languages  * Ada Semantic Interface Specification (ASIS)

At SIGAda'98, the ASIS Workshop focused on where do we go from here. A principal concern was the issue of ASIS extensions to support the development of higher level abstractions. Extensions to the ASIS specification may be required for a host of valid reasons. The principle reason identified was:

.       Provide higher level abstractions to increase productivity and effectiveness of the ASIS tool developer. The ASIS interfaces reflect the low-level syntactic level of the source code. A higher level abstraction might incorporate a number of ASIS queries. Such higher level abstractions could be useful to different classes of tool developers to support specialized requirements (e.g., additional OO analysis, static run-time analysis). These interfaces should be implementable using the standard ASIS interfaces. For ASIS 83, the Program View Layer (PVL) was developed to provide such abstractions. The PVL was implemented in 100% ASIS 83 interfaces, thus making the secondary layer portable across ASIS implementations. Such a secondary layer has not been developed or defined for ASIS 95.

These abstractions raise a number of issues, such as:
.       Should there be a recognized taxonomy?
.       Should there be conventions useful for all vendors and implementors?
.       Should we develop a voluntary standard for such conventions?

An excellent strawman was developed as a result of last year's ASIS Workshop. Now with experience, Should we refine the strawman and make it even more effective? Since the SIGAda'98 ASIS Workshop, ASIS for Ada95 extensions have been developed and are available on the ASIS Home Page. This is an excellent time to address the needs of emerging ASIS extensions.

Participants from the compiler vendor community, tool vendor community, and user community will be asked to identify ASIS higher level abstraction,needs for extensions. The workshop will address voluntary naming conventions, and a possible taxonomy for categorizing extensions to facilitate their selection/use.

Hopefully their thoughts will trigger your ideas to identify things the ASIS Community should be doing to better support the Ada community.

As last year, the results will be published in Ada Letters, and will guide the activities of the ASIS community for years to come.  Your input will be extremely valuable in planning your future. Please plan on coming.

For last year's report, please see:  "Workshop Report: ASIS - Where Do We
Go From Here? 6-10 PM, Sunday, 8 November 1998, SIGAda'98, Washington, D.C.",
Ada Letters, Volume XIX, No. 1, March 1999, p.42.
 
 

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created 17 August, 2000  -  dfh