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"Team Ada: Ada Advocacy Issues (83 & 95)" <[log in to unmask]>
Subject:
From:
Tom Moran <[log in to unmask]>
Date:
Tue, 12 Oct 1999 14:28:38 PDT
Reply-To:
Tom Moran <[log in to unmask]>
Parts/Attachments:
text/plain (42 lines)
> will probably be taken by readers to mean "Ada and UML don't work
> together".  Could those who know this subject please comment.

  This thread has been quite illuminating, at least to me.  It
appears that, yes, Ada and UML do work together, there are
(multiple) tools available, but the article authors had specific
problems which the available tools, and indeed UML in general,
don't address.

> The response could simply state that the "UML is inadequate to
> fully express the rich software engineering expressiveness of Ada,
> and so extensions and expressions outside of UML are being
> investigated to provide complete Ada 95/UML forward and reverse
> engineering."

  That would be a good "CACM Forum" response.  Even better, of
course, would be a full article.  It could discuss translations
which can be, but aren't now, handled well by today's tools (e.g.
Ada child packages), things like configuration management that are
inappropriate for UML to specify, but which real world tools must
deal with, and things in UML or in Ada (e.g.  generic packages or
MI) that might require enhancement to either UML or Ada, or
subsetting on one side or the other.  An article by someone who
knows the details (such as some mentioned in this thread) would
seem to me a very interesting and appropriate CACM article.

  I'm sorry my misinterpretation was offensive to the authors.
This is TEAM-ADA, an advocacy forum, not comp.lang.ada, and I
thought the indicated statements could, and would, be taken by a
not-insignificant subset of readers to say that mixing Ada with UML
will lead to insoluble problems.  That clearly wasn't the authors'
intent.  Though the article starts by saying "...our group ...  are
generally very new to a number of the technologies ..., Ada, ...",
they indeed were quite aware of things like Rational Rose.  Their
problems were very specific and they had limited space to go into
detail on what is, of course, a side issue to the article's main
thrust.  I hope no other CACM readers got the wrong idea, and hope
even more that this could result in an educational letter or
article in CACM.

Tom Moran

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