Dear Team-Ada:

Another important milestone has occurred in the life of ASIS.  Back in
1992, Al Kopp and Jim Bladen, both of TeleSoft, speculated that ASIS
could be used to reconstruct the source code of an entire Ada partition
simply by making ASIS queries into the compilation environment. This
speculation has now turned into reality!!!

Alfred Strohmeier, Vasiliy Fofanov, Sergey Rybin and Stephane Barbey
will be presenting a paper at Ada-Europe'98 (see
http://www.ada-europe.org/) titled: "Quality-for-ASIS: A Portable
Testing Facility for ASIS." The paper describes the development of an
extensive testing facility for ASIS implementations. Of particular
interest is the approach taken for the testing of the generic procedure
Traverse_Element. The strategy is to compile the ACVC test suite, which
contains all possible Ada 95 syntactic elements, and reconstruct the
ACVC using only ASIS queries.

The paper reported: "The implementation of Traverse_Element in
ASIS-for-GNAT passed successfully this test."

This is very important achievement as it is a clear indicator of the
maturity of ASIS. This test demonstrates that ASIS implementations can
correctly handle every Ada 95 syntactic element, as evidenced by
reconstructing the ACVC using ASIS queries.

Thank you Alfred, Vasiliy, Sergey, and Stephane for this important
demonstration!

v/r
Currie Colket
Chair ASISWG/Chair ASISRG
[log in to unmask]
+1 (703) 242-4561

P.S. An electronic copy of this paper is on the ASIS Home Page =>

            http://www.acm.org/sigada/WG/asiswg

under Upcoming ASISWG/ASISRG Meetings and Events. Section 2 contains a
very nice introduction to ASIS. The paper describes an excellent
approach to testing ASIS and should be of value to all implementors.

The Quality-for-ASIS facility is freely available from LGL-DI-EPFL ftp
site at =>

         ftp://lglftp.epfl.ch/pub/ASIS/

The readme file for the Quality-for-ASIS distribution is called
readme.Q4A.

The distribution itself is in a file Q4A.tar.gz.