Re: ASIS?

[Niklas Holsti <niklas.holsti@tidorum.invalid>]

parthaspanda22@gmail.com wrote:
 >Niklas Holsti wrote:
>>You list various non-ASIS sources for the target- and
>>link-map-specific information (below). Your original query was:
> 
> 
> How? By extending the ASIS spec to include map file information,
> isnt the map file made redundant? Of course, it will
> require multiple tools in the chain to write to
> a common ASIS database.

This would bring in such a lot of new information that I would not 
call the result an "ASIS database". It would be a database that 
contains ASIS information *plus* other things. Maybe it should be 
called "ASIS-Plus" :-)

>>But there are some executable
>>program formats that include most of the ASIS-like information (for
>>C code, at least), so for such executable formats a debugger would
>>need no additional information from the IDE.
> 
> It would be difficult to debug Generics or variant record types
> unless there were a HLL interface.

Well, I know a C++ compiler in which the debug info in the 
executable (proprietary format) shows the whole class inheritance 
structure, including which calls in the code are virtual function 
calls and which are statically bound. There is also information on 
templates, in-lined calls, #defined macros, etc, and references to 
the source-code files, line numbers and column numbers where all 
those things are defined.

GNAT, too, puts a lot of information in the debug info. I haven't 
had occasion to look deeply into that, perhaps there is something 
about generics in it.

> I expect ASIS to atleast
> be able to address all Ada-specific syntactic sugar.

The debugger will still have the problem of mapping the Ada-level 
ASIS information to the machine-level program entities, including 
identifier mangling (eg. for instances of generics) and 
optimizations that delete variables and subprograms.

Your aim -- as I have grasped it -- is to combine the ASIS 
high-level information with low-level (machine-level) information 
from other sources (eg. the link map) and make it all accessible as 
an ASIS-like database structure. Good idea, but let's not call it 
just "ASIS".

-- 
Niklas Holsti
Tidorum Ltd
niklas holsti tidorum fi
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