TEAM-ADA Archives

Team Ada: Ada Programming Language Advocacy

TEAM-ADA@LISTSERV.ACM.ORG

Options: Use Forum View

Use Proportional Font
Show Text Part by Default
Show All Mail Headers

Message: [<< First] [< Prev] [Next >] [Last >>]
Topic: [<< First] [< Prev] [Next >] [Last >>]
Author: [<< First] [< Prev] [Next >] [Last >>]

Print Reply
Subject:
From:
Reply To:
W. Wesley Groleau (Wes)
Date:
Thu, 3 Apr 1997 23:27:07 EST
Content-Type:
text/plain
Parts/Attachments:
text/plain (45 lines)
:> literature and find that the only products appearing to fill the bill
:> are Ada-ASSURED (by GrammaTech in Ithaca, NY) and AdaMAT (by Dynamics
:> Research Corp. in Andover, MA).  I would appreciate it if other

I had some complaints with Ada-ASSURED, but overall, I think it's a good
product.  Ada-ASSURED is more of a pretty-printer with a little extra,
while AdaMAT is more of an analyzer.

Ada-ASSURED works on one file at a time and does no semantic analysis
(again, unless it has changed).  Therefore, it can not tell you semantic
things.

AdaMAT has its own library system, and must process everything your file
depends on before it can give you any information.  When I was trying to
use it to locate unused context clauses, it frequently crashed before it
finished with "higher-level" project wide libraries.  Only rarely did
I manage to get info pertinent to the code I was working on.  And then it
literally took hours on a SPARC 2.  At the time, also, there documentation
looked like someone gave a non-technical person instructions like,
"The documentation for these twelve commands is almost the same as this
one.  I'll edit the differences later."  (And never did the edit!)

Furthermore, I personally felt that giving an AdaMAT report and the
documentation to an inexperienced programmer would result in WORSE code
(in terms of readability, maintainability, and even efficiency.

In many cases, DRC's advice was opposite to what I considered wise practice
regarding readability, maintainability, etc.  Now I could be the one that's
wrong, but feedback about my code from others seems to suggest otherwise.

(The fact that I agree with most of the stuff in AQS also suggests that
many of the experts cited in the AQS preface might come to the same
conclusions about AdaMAT)

Products in AdaMAT's domain (analyzers) include Logiscope which I recommend,
and ADADL which I don't, and LittleTree's Ada Analyzer which works via
ASIS.  Ada Analyzer integrates into Apex--don't know whether it's limited
to that.  Apex also has a pretty-printer _almost_ as good as Ada-ASSURED.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------
W. Wesley Groleau (Wes)                                Office: 219-429-4923
Hughes Defense Communications (MS 10-41)                 Home: 219-471-7206
Fort Wayne,  IN   46808                  (Unix): [log in to unmask]
---------------------------------------------------------------------------

ATOM RSS1 RSS2