Dear Team Ada,
Tri-Ada'97 will be having a number of ASIS activities ranging from
tutorial, panel, a paper session, and a BOF. This email contains a list
of the ASIS activities planned at Tri-Ada'97 with extended abstracts.
This would give you an excellent opportunity to find out more about
ASIS and perhaps even include ASIS concepts/simple programs in
educational programs of which you are involved. ASIS is a powerful tool
to the application developer as it allows one to quickly roll one's
own tool to check out things of interest.
The latest addition to the list is a joint ASISWG and Safety and
Security Working Group (SAFEWG) BOF using the safety-critical
and very mission-critical application of making India Pale
Ale. India Pale Ale has more hops and more alcohol than traditional
Ale to serve as a preservative for the long trip to India. Yes, a great
tasting Ale is very mission-critical and the process is very
safety-critical. Yes, ASIS can be used to make a great tasting Ale.
The activities, along with extended abstracts are provided below.
This is a great time to register for the conference as the lowest
possible rates are still available until 9 October. Information for
registration is provided at the following URL:
http://www.acm.org/sigada/tri-ada/
It is very important to register for the conference as soon as
possible. For the ASIS Tutorial on Monday morning, please check
M2 on the registration form.
In my last email, I encouraged everyone to check out the ASIS Home
Page, but neglected to provide the URL. It is:
http://www.acm.org/sigada/WG/asiswg
Besides having the ASIS 20p, there is also a new section containing
ASIS 95 tutorials. This is a great place to find out more about
using ASIS for code analysis to support reliability and quality
evaluation for your mission-critical and safety-critical software.
ASIS will allow an application developer to easily and quickly
roll-your-own tool to support specific development requirements.
Incidentally, the CD ROM to be distributed at Tri-Ada'97, has the
current ASIS 20p along with the ASIS 95 tutorials.
I encourage you to pass this email on to your colleagues who might
be interested in ASIS.
v/r
Currie Colket
Chair ASISWG/Chair ASISRG
[log in to unmask]
[Note new email address]
Extended abstracts for ASIS Activities at Tri-Ada'97 =>
1. Monday Morning, 10 November; Half Day Tutorial
2. Tuesday Afternoon, 11 November; 4:00-5:30 P.M.; ASIS Panel
3. Wednesday Afternoon, 12 November; 4:00-5:30 P.M. Paper Session
4. Wednesday Evening, 12 November; 7:30-9:30 Joint SAFEWG/ASISWG BOF
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Monday Morning, 10 November; Half Day Tutorial
Building Development Tools for Use with GNAT.
Sergey I. Rybin, Moscow State University
Cyrille Comar, ACT
This tutorial will explain how you can built your
development and analysis tools when working with
GNAT. Some sample tools are presented to
demonstrate different approaches to tool development.
Participants should have a good understanding of Ada
semantics, and basic experience in programming with
GNAT is helpful, but not required.
The tutorial consists of two parts. In the first part
(presented by Cyrille Comar) the general approach for
developing tools for the GNAT Ada 95 compilation system
is discussed. In the second part (presented by Sergey Rybin)
ASIS is presented as an effective technology for building
the wide range of useful tools.
The first part starts from the general overview of GNAT,
including compiler's internal data structures and existing
GNAT toolset. Then different technologies for building tools
for GNAT are compared to give some ideas which technology
should be used for a specific tool. ASIS is positioned as
a technology which provides a proper (that is, standardized,
stable and high-level) interface to compiler's internals
and allows to build both free and proprietary tools for GNAT.
The second part is an introductory ASIS (sub)tutorial, and its
main goal is to help the audience to get started with writing
their own ASIS tools. It starts from the general definition
of ASIS, examples of ASIS-based code fragments and tools which
can be built on top of ASIS. The main ASIS abstractions, such
as Context, Compilation Unit and Element, are described.
Then the tour guide through the ASIS specification is presented.
The goal of this tour is to show, what and where things are
defined in ASIS, and how to navigate in the ASIS specification.
A short overview of the ASIS implementation for GNAT goes next.
And then some practical aspects of ASIS-based tool development
are discussed in order to show, that ASIS really is easy-to-use
and easy-to-start and give the audience some hints and tips
how to build your own ASIS tool. This part contains the basic
cycle of an ASIS application, specific and general traversing of Ada
programs by means of ASIS queries, dealing with lists of Elements
and Compilation Units, the idea of ASIS secondary layers,
notion of consistency in an ASIS Context and dealing with ASIS
implementation-specific features in ASIS applications.
+------------------------------------------------------------+
Tuesday Afternoon, 11 November; 4:00-5:30 P.M.; ASIS Panel
ASIS Panel: Roll Your Own Analysis Tools
Chair: Mr. Currie Colket, Chairman ASISWG/ASISRG
Panelists: Dr. Joyce, Tokar, DDC-I
Technical Presentation on ASIS 95 Interface
Dr. Bill Thomas, MITRE
Rolling Your Own Tools using ASIS
Dr. Herm Fischer, MARK V
Roll Your Own Tools from ObjectMaker Experience
Mr. Clyde Roby, IDA
ASIS 95 Artifacts on the Internet
Abstract for ASIS Panel =>
The panel discussion will focus on how a typical Ada developer
can use the Ada Semantic Interface Specification (ASIS) to rapidly
build "roll-your-own" tools for special analysis of compilable
Ada source code for a variety of purposes (such as call tree
analysis, object/type usage analysis, browsing, etc.). This
panel session will address the ASIS 95 specification focusing
on its use for ASIS-based tools to evaluate quality in general,
and more specifically, for its analysis of mission-critical/
safety-critical systems.
ASIS is an interface between an Ada environment, as defined
by the Ada-95 Reference Manual, and any tool requiring information
from this environment. An Ada environment includes valuable
semantic and syntactic information useful for assessing software
quality. ASIS has been designed to be independent of underlying Ada
environment implementations, thus supporting the portability of
ASIS-based software engineering tools across proprietary Ada
compilation environments. Simple ASIS-based tools have already been
demonstrated to be portable across vendor Ada compilation environments.
Examples of tools that benefit from the ASIS interface include:
automated code monitors, browsers, call tree tools, code
reformators, coding standards compliance tools, correctness
verifiers, debuggers, dependency tree analysis tools, design
tools, document generators, metrics tools, quality assessment
tools, reverse engineering tools, re-engineering tools, style
checkers, test tools, timing estimators, and translators.
In fact most of these have already been developed using the ASIS
interfaces by people in Australia, Canada, China, Denmark, France,
Germany, Japan, Russia, Sweden, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, and
the United States. Many of these tools can be easily built by a code
developer using ASIS in a matter of days.
+------------------------------------------------------------+
Wednesday Afternoon, 12 November; 4:00-5:30 P.M. Paper Session
Development Tools II Session:
ASIStint: An Interactive ASIS Interpreter
Mr. Vasiliy Fofanov, Moscow State University,
Dr. Sergey Rybin, Moscow State University,
Professor Alfred Strohmeier, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology
ASIStint is an interactive ASIS interpreter with scripting
facilities. It may be used for learning ASIS, i.e., the user may
try out interactively the effects of the various ASIS queries.
It might also be used as an assistant (sic!) when experimenting
with ASIS queries, e.g., in order to find out a way of implementing
a part of an ASIS application, or to correct it. Yet another use is
debugging and testing an ASIS implementation. Input-output of a
session may be recorded, and then be replayed.
+-----------------------------------------------------------------+
Wednesday Evening, 12 November; 7:30-9:30 Joint BOF
Joint Safety & Security Working Group [SAFEWG] and
ASIS Working Group [ASISWG] BOF
Mr. George Romanski, Chair SAFEWG
Mr. Currie Colket, Chair ASISWG/ASISRG
Mr. Steve Blake, AONIX
Dr. Bill Thomas, MITRE
A safety-critical/mission-critical application will be
presented which is used to make India Pale Ale [Yes,
safety-critical, and we will all agree, taste is very
mission-critical]. Safety aspects will be discussed which
will lend themselves to ASIS code analysis.
Samples of the mission-critical India Pale Ale may be
available, pending approval.
Introduction [Currie Colket]
Description of Safety-Critical Concerns
in Mission-Critical Applications [George Romanski]
Short Technical Overview of ASIS [Steve Blake]
Description of Pale India Ale Mission-Critical
Application [George Romanski] [Perhaps also free samples]
Use of ASIS to analyze code [Bill Thomas]
Questions & Answers
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For more information on Tri-Ada'97 and the ASIS activities there,
please check out the Tri-Ada'97 Home Page at =>
http://www.acm.org/sigada/tri-ada/
The Tri-Ada '97 Conference, the annual meeting of the Ada programming
world, is meeting at the Adam's Mark Hotel, St. Louis, MO, November
9-13, 1997. Keynote Speakers include Lt. Gen. Emmett Paige, Jr.,
USA (ret.); Lt. Col. Drew Hamilton, USMA; Dr. Edward F. Miller,
Software Research, Inc.; John B. Goodenough, PhD., SEI; and Dr.
Charles B. Engle, Jr., Q-Labs. Advance programs are in the mail now.
If you haven't received one, contact Tri-Ada '97 organizers at the
following:
TEL: 1-800/338-5365 (USA & Canada only); 1-919/419-8242.
E-MAIL: mailto:[log in to unmask]
WEB: http://www.acm.org/sigada/tri-ada/
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