Using ASIS in an Ada83 to Ada95 Translator
Rainer Koschke (Koschke@informatik.uni-stuttgart.de)
indicates a continued interest in ASIS. In the department of Prof.
Erhard Ploedereder, they are planning to develop a translator from Ada
83 to Ada 95. They will use the Rational compiler as a front end. The
information they need is provided by an ASIS interface of the Rational
compiler.
SEE-Ada, displays an Ada program graphically
Rod Martin (rjm@itd.dsto.gov.au) indicate that
they are marketting a tool (called SEE-Ada written in Ada) that
displays information about an input Ada program graphically. In
particular SEE-Ada displays parent/child relationships such as
Spec/Body, Subprogram/Encapsulating Subprogram, Subprogram
Call/Subprogram Called etc. A utility Data_Filter obtains the above
relationships using ASIS. It steps through all Compilation Units in an
Ada library for a nominated main program and examines every Element
(using Traverse_Elements). For certain elements information and
relationships are recorded for SEE-Ada to display.
Software for Automatic Train Operation
Daniel Dolle (daniel.dolle@matra-transport.fr)
of Matra Transport in France indicates that his firm writes software
for automatic train operation. In order to ensure the safety of our
systems they use a special programming technique: all computations are
done at run-time with redundancy bits. Before the execution they
analyse the source code and compute tables that enable them to know
beforehand the redundant part of each variable at the end of a
computation cycle. Any discrepancy between the computed and the
expected redundancy causes an emergency brake. Until now they directly
analysed the source code; now they are currently investigating whether
it would not be easier to let a compiler do a compiler's work
(syntactic analysis, identification, etc ...). A solution based on
ASIS seems natural: vendor independency, use of a standard, etc. ...
University work
Universities: mainly NYU; also, the University of Central Florida
is doing some work on the real-time issues relating to ASIS.
U.S. Companies and their products
New tools developed by US companies are being done by those
companies with more active ASISWG members, e.g., Rational, Thomson
(formerly Alsys/Telesoft), Unisys, Odyssey Research Associates,
etc. In a recent print advertisement, Dynamics Research
Corporation prominently mentioned ASIS.
LRM Interfaces on top of ASIS83
Dan Ehrenfried (DHE@LittleTree.Com) of Little Tree
Consulting in Mountain View, California, is offering the LRM interfaces
on top of ASIS 83. "LRM Interfaces" are a (no longer supported)
Rational product which was the ancestor of ASIS. Dan's offering is an
enhanced version of the LRM Interfaces: his product and ASIS both have
the original Rational product as common ancestors. Many of the
declarations are just renamings of the corresponding ASIS declarations;
but the rest of it qualifies as a secondary, non-primitive layer above
ASIS, implementing (among other features) the iterator capability that
had been so hotly debated in past ASISWG meetings.
Last update 19 June 1996. Questions, comments to Clyde Roby (CRoby@IDA.Org)