From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.4.4 (2020-01-24) on polar.synack.me X-Spam-Level: X-Spam-Status: No, score=-1.3 required=5.0 tests=BAYES_00,INVALID_MSGID autolearn=no autolearn_force=no version=3.4.4 X-Google-Language: ENGLISH,ASCII-7-bit X-Google-Thread: 103376,7eb197ff5e1a70c8 X-Google-Attributes: gid103376,public From: "Marc A. Criley" Subject: Re: Ada -> IDL (this is not a typo!) Date: 1998/12/04 Message-ID: <3667E32A.91F297D8@lmco.com>#1/1 X-Deja-AN: 418607432 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit References: <366543C6.3E232C33@lmco.com> <7472hm$5cc$1@supernews.com> To: Brad Balfour Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Organization: Lockheed Martin M&DS Mime-Version: 1.0 Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada Date: 1998-12-04T00:00:00+00:00 List-Id: Brad Balfour wrote: > > In article <366543C6.3E232C33@lmco.com>, "Marc A. Criley" 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. > 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