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Currie Colket <[log in to unmask]>
Wed, 13 Oct 1999 17:15:25 -0400
text/plain (149 lines)
Dear ASISWG/ASISRG,
     Team-Ada,
     SIGAda-Announce,
     HRG,
     WG9:

This is an update on the announcement sent in early September. 

There are going to be a number of ASIS activities at SIGAda'99 to
include a tutorial, paper presentations, an ASIS Workshop addressing
ASIS Extensions for Higher Level Abstractions, and an ISO/IEC JTC1/SC22
WG9 Report. This could be an excellent time to find out more about ASIS
and get involved in the ASIS Community!

We specially urge you to participate in the ASIS Workshop on Thursday
afternoon (details attached).

These activities are as follows:

1.  Monday, 18 October, from 2:00-5:30 P.M., ASIS Tutorial: "Building
Ada Development Tools with ASIS-for-GNAT" by Sergey Rybin and Vasily
Fofanov.
2.  Tuesday, 19 October, from 2:00-3:30 P.M., Paper in the Distributed
Systems Issues Track: "CORBA and CORBA services for DSA" by Thomas
Quinot, Fabien Azavant, Jean-Marie Cottin, Laurent Kubler, Vincent
Niebel, Laurent Pautet, Sébastien Ponce, and Samuel Tardieu.
3.  Tuesday, 19 October, from 2:00-3:30 P.M., Paper in the Software
Engineering Track: "Transitioning an ASIS Application: Version 1 to
Ada95 2.0" by Joseph Wisniewski.
4.  Tuesday, 19 October, from 2:00-3:30 P.M., Paper in the Software
Engineering Track: "Code Analysis of Safety-Critical and Real-Time
Software Using ASIS" by Currie Colket [The paper will be presented by
Bill Thomas].
5.  Thursday, 21 October, from 1:30-5:30 P.M., ASIS Workshop: ASIS
Extensions for Higher Level Abstractions by ASISWG/ASISRG. Steve Blake,
the Vice Chair of ASISWG, will be chairing the Workshop.
6.  Friday, 22 October, ISO/IEC JTC1/SC22 WG9 Meeting, Clyde Roby will
be giving the ASISRG Report. (Closed meeting, contact Jim Moore,
Convener, at [log in to unmask] if interested in attending).

If you have any issues you would like to raise at the ASIS Workshop,
please send email to me and, if you like, the [log in to unmask]
ASIS-Technical maillist.

You are encouraged to go to SIGAda'99. The conference is addressing the
engineering of industrial strength real-time and distributed systems
using Ada and related technologies. If you are working in real-time and
distribution, you should find the conference quite valuable to both
yourself and your employer. This will also be an excellent time to find
out more about ASIS and get involved with the ASIS community.

To find out more about the SIGAda'99 Conference, please check out the
following URL:

        http://www.acm.org/sigs/sigada/conf/sigada99/

v/r
Currie Colket 
Chair ASISWG/ASISRG

P.S.1  Unfortunately I will not be able to participate in all these
activities. I had hip replacement surgery on 7 September and cannot
attend. I appreciate the dedication of others to serve the ASIS
community in my place. Bill Thomas will be presenting my paper on
Tuesday; Steve Blake will be chairing the ASIS Workshop on Thursday, and
Clyde Roby will be providing the ASISRG Report to WG9 on Friday. Many
thanks to each of you. 

P.S.2  I provided a bad email address in the previous announcement about
Ration. The address should be [log in to unmask] (with the
underscore vice the hyphen).

ASIS Workshop Write-up:
+--------------------------------------------------------------------+
                          SIGAda'99
                        ASIS Workshop

       ASIS Extensions for Higher Level Abstractions
                     Thursday, October 21
                       1:30 - 5:30 P.M.
                  Redondo Beach, California

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

The 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:

ˇ 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: 
ˇ Should there be a recognized taxonomy? 
ˇ Should there be conventions useful for all vendors and implementors? 
ˇ 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, pp.
42-47. The report is also available on-line at the
http://www.acm.org/sigada/conf/sa98/ASIS_Workshop_SIGAda98_Report.doc
URL.

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