Re: Ada -> IDL (this is not a typo!)

["Marc A. Criley" <marc.a.criley@lmco.com>]

Brad Balfour wrote:
> 
> In article <366543C6.3E232C33@lmco.com>, "Marc A. Criley" <marc.a.criley@lmco.com> wrote:
> >While the CORBA/Ada vendors provide IDL compilers to
> >generate Ada 95 from the IDL, is there a "decompiler"
> >that does the reverse?
> >Given a set of type declarations in a package (and the
> >packages that are depended upon) that are used for
> >external interfacing, is there a tool out there
> >that will generate corresponding IDL?
> 
> No, not to my knowledge.
> 
> It is certainly technically feasible, but I'm not sure that the result is what
> you'd like. Let me explain:
> 
> [A] Feasible:
> It is quite possible to create a mapping from an Ada package specification to
> the corresponding IDL declarations. However, the OMG (and its Ada revision
> task force) have not done so. Most Ada constructs mapping from IDL to Ada is
> trivially reversable from Ada to IDL.

Brad,

Thanks for your comments.  Indeed they help me focus better on what
exactly I was interested in.  It's not so much a full-blown IDL->Ada
converter, as something more along the lines of the c2ada tool that
converts C headers to Ada.  I was looking for something that would convert
Ada type definitions to IDL, I wasn't really concerned about the
subprograms.
I expected adopting CORBA to drive significant changes to the interfacing
implementation.

While it is true that the IDL-->Ada mapping is "trivially reversible", when
there's a lot of interface messages, the constituents of which need to be
traced back into their defining packages, it can get rather tedious, hence
is a good candidate for automation.  If tool could do most of the job, with
some final editing or cleanup of warnings, that'd be sufficent for me.

<Additional good commentary snipped>

> I hope that this explanation answers your questions.
> 
> Thanks,
> Brad
> 
> --
> Brad Balfour
> Director of Technology Services
> Objective Interface
> Brad.Balfour@ois.com    703/295-6533 (voice)   703/295-6501 (fax)

-- 
Marc A. Criley
Chief Software Architect
Lockheed Martin M&DS
marc.a.criley@lmco.com
Phone: (610) 354-7861
Fax  : (610) 354-7308