At 10:30 PM -0400 21/7/98, Rich Hilliard wrote:
>> > They were:  --|
>>
>> I believe this is based on an IEEE spec.  Anyone familiar with it?
>> Can't find my own notes on it.
>
>Now we're really digging into Ada trivia!
>
>As I recall, Anna had two types of structured comments:
>
>--: virtual Ada
>
>--| annotations
>
>Annotations were the things you want to express about the
>program (invariants, pre-, post conditions, etc.). Virtual
>Ada was the 'scaffolding' you needed to write to give the
>annotations an operational interpretation (over and above
>the code itself you were annotating.)
>
>IEEE 990-1987, Recommended Practice for Ada as a Program
>Design Language, recommended that "structured comments" be
>"identified by a sentinel character, word or phrase
>immediately following the double dash that indicates a
>comment to an Ada compiler ..." -- but it did not prescribe
>a particular sentinel.
>
> -- Rich Hilliard


Are there any hooks built into ASIS to support this? I could imagine a
preprocessor being built with ASIS, which would call on the appropriate
routines once the embedded comment symbol is found.

E.g. if we decided on

        --|

as the lead in character, followed by a language identifier such as

        "anna.annotations", "anna.virtual"

or the like, a useful facility could be built for not much effort. So long
as the full ASIS/compilation state was available to the called procedure,
then you could do pretty much anything you like. Care would have to be
taken when _several_ embedded languages were present. Does anyone know of
any similar work in this area?

Dale