Re: File name conventions for Ada units

Re: File name conventions for Ada units

[munck]

Alex Blakemore writes:

>Even better, some systems (e.g. Rational) don't view source as files
>- you edit the actual library units.  This problem never arises. 

and Robert Firth replies:

> And this, surely, is the right answer. ...

Well, maybe.  It seems to me that it just moves the problem under discussion,
since the library itself is a file (always?) with the possibility of being
named "name.type".  The REAL problem, of course, is that UNIX, MSDOS, VMS,
and everything else in wide use allow names of that form, leading good Ada
programmers to equate the ".type" with the TYPE of an Ada object.  Encoding
the type of something in its name is a state-of-the-art solution made popular
by FORTRAN I, except that FORTRAN enforced the IJK.. convention and these
"modern" OSs do not.

The real right answer is that of modern PSE data repositories such as
CAIS-A, PCTE+, and ATIS, the strongly-typed Entity-Relationship-Attribute
data structure.  Ada source code, if that's what your system uses, should
be contained in an object of type AdaSource, with CompiledInto relationships
to objects of type AdaLibrary.  Better, of course, would be what TeleSoft
is said to be doing on PCTE+, implementing the library as an ERA structure.
Then all the tools that need to operate on data found in the library - editors,
compilers, analyzers, linkers, etc - can "see" the entities and relationships
in the library.

Bob Munck

Library implementation, was file name conventions

[Jerry Callen]

Bob Munck, munck@STARS.RESTON.UNISYS.COM, writes:
>The real right answer is that of modern PSE data repositories such as
>CAIS-A, PCTE+, and ATIS, the strongly-typed Entity-Relationship-Attribute
>data structure.  Ada source code, if that's what your system uses, should
>be contained in an object of type AdaSource, with CompiledInto relationships
>to objects of type AdaLibrary.  Better, of course, would be what TeleSoft
>is said to be doing on PCTE+, implementing the library as an ERA structure.
>Then all the tools that need to operate on data found in the library - editors,
>compilers, analyzers, linkers, etc - can "see" the entities and relationships
>in the library.

Ah, yes. The Intermetrics "AIE" (Ada Integrated Environment). The program
library was built on a subset of the "old" CAIS, with the idea that it
could easily be ported to a "real" CAIS implementation when one was available.
You could easily traverse the library and find all sorts of good dependency
information, etc. Definitely slick stuff. I have yet to find a compiler
(well, maybe Rational) that provide the find of flexibilty and control over
the library that the Intermetrics compiler does. There was/is also an 
interface package to allow one to cruise around in the diana. This is
NOT new technology, folks.

There was just one little problem: performance was, uh, not the best, at least
not until some serious hacking was done on the "subset CAIS." I can't WAIT to
see how a compiler built on CAIS-A performs. But then again, we have to do
_something_ with all the MIPS on those shiny new workstations...

-- Jerry "I like Ada, but I'm not convinced about CAIS-A" Callen
   jcallen@encore.com

CLAIMER: I used to work on the Intermetrics compiler.