Re: Ada to C Translator

[Marin David Condic <mcondic.nospam@acm.org>]

An excellent point. PtC was actually capable of generating code in a handful of
different languages so in a sense, it became its own "programming language".
Most of the Ada that was generated was essentially viewed as a "high level
assembly language" and so readability was not as much of a concern. However, it
still produced reasonably readable code and there were reasons why it
periodically needed to be looked at. (Verification and hand modification were
two big reasons.)

In an environment where you have something like PtC, the advantage you get is a
kind of lower level documentation that helps you to understand the system. I
think the actual source code starts becoming less of an issue in this case.
However, I don't think that something like PtC would be useful for any and all
applications. It worked well for us because we had a very narrow usage, so the
diagrams could become really specialized. I'd doubt that for more general kinds
of things it would work as well. UML seems to be too high an abstraction to get
code from unless you are somehow hand-coding part of it. Then the same rules for
readability would apply to the code.

Obviously, the benefits you cite are equally important considerations for
long-lived systems.

MDC

Ken Garlington wrote:

> Your mentioning the F119 raises a question in my mind that I probably should
> have asked a long time ago. IIRC, the Pratt & Whitney gang used Pictures to
> Code extensively for the engine control. Did the advantages you describe
> below (easy to read, etc.) really matter in that case, given that Ada
> essentially became an intermediate language? Now that the rest of the world
> seems to be catching on to this idea (automatic code generation from UML,
> etc.), I wonder if that trend is going to make other attributes of
> text-based languages more important - portability, availability and
> robustness of associated compilers, etc. No one extols the readability of
> J-code, do they?

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