Re: Ada95 and UML

[Peter Amey <pna@praxis-cs.co.uk>]

Martin Dowie wrote:
> 
> v4 of Artisan's Real-Time Studio Pro (out in a couple of months) are
> supporting
> Ada code generation from UML in 4 flavours:
> 
> 1. Ada83
> 2. SPARK Ada83
> 3. Ada95
> 4. SPARK Ada95(? didn't now this was out yet...presumably supporting
>     Ravenscar)
> 

SPARK 95 has been out for years!  It differs from SPARK 83 primarily in
support for child packages which map extremely well on to the kind of
hierarchical state refinement that works so well in SPARK.  We are
indeed working very hard on SPARK Ravenscar and hope to be able to
announce something soon along these lines.

As far as the original question is concerned I would be very careful
with UML -> Ada generation for critical applications using the kinds of
defaults the tools will come set with.  These tend to create objects on
the heap and return a pointer to them in a very cavalier fashion which
can make code verification extremely difficult.  We have had some
success tailoring tools such as Rose to produce abstract data type,
object-based code rather than fully-fledged OOP.  The limitations on how
much of UML can be used are more than offset by the improved ease of
verification.  

Peter