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From: Gerhard Radatz <gerhard.radatz@aut.alcatel.at>
Subject: Re: Finding out parameters which are not written
Date: 1997/08/12
Message-ID: <33F07EA1.51D1@aut.alcatel.at>#1/1
X-Deja-AN: 263731619
References: <33F02867.322D@aut.alcatel.at>
Organization: Alcatel Austria AG
Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada
Date: 1997-08-12T00:00:00+00:00
List-Id: <comp.lang.ada>


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.