Re: Moving from Ada 83 to Ada 95

["Martin Dowie" <martin.dowie@baesystems.com>]

vrenna wrote:
> Has someone done such thing? I need to move a huge application made
> in Ada 83 and installed on Solaris, to Ada 95 (probably on Linux)...
> looks very tough but maybe there're automatic tools and good advices
> out there. What do you say?

If the original was well written (i.e. with portability in mind) then it
should be very straight forward. I had the misfortune to try with some very
badly written code - 'with'-ing in package System into every other package
and using the non-standard items in it! Other things that needed changing
were subtle little things that one compiler would accept the new one
wouldn't, e.g.

1) Address clauses must immediately follow the object declaration in the new
one;
2) Deal with non-portable pragmas;
3) Spot 'new' Ada95 reserved words;
4) Array indexing changes

The last of these may have been the original compiler (XD-Ada) being
"over-zealous", as I've found nothing in any porting guide that indicates
this should have been necessary.

In the end I wrote a small (~400 NCNB lines) program to do it all.

Cheers

-- Martin