Re: Finding out parameters which are not written

[Gerhard Radatz <gerhard.radatz@aut.alcatel.at>]

Gerhard Radatz wrote:
> 
> Does anyone know about a tool which can detect such situations as the
> following:
> 
>         procedure xxx (result: out INTEGER) is
>         begin
>              if <<condition>> then
>                  result := 0;
>              end if;
>         end;
> 
> Obviously, this proc is erroneous and result will not be written if
> <<condition>> is FALSE.
> However, my Ada-Compiler (DEC-ADA for VMS) does not detect this problem,
> because result is written "at least once" in the body of xxx.
> 
> Is there any tool which can provide help ???

I admit that it is very difficult to find such potential problems at
compile time. Therefore, I'm rather looking for such a thing like an
expert system which can examine complex code, evaluate every possible
flow of control and at least give some hints.

Surely its best to code-read to be able to find out unwritten
parameters, but in projects consisting of a few hundred packages with a
few 100.000 lines of code, this is lots of work.