Re: reverse engineering

[schwarza@gdls.com (Art Schwarz)]

In article <55ndb9$t02@news1.mnsinc.com>, wfrye@mnsinc.com (William Frye) writes:
>I am currently interested in doing reverse engineering on a sizable system,
>does anyone know of a program that enables one to pull off the logical
>constructs (if-then else, case etc.) from an Ada program and write them to
>a test case matrix?  Can YAC or Bison be used for this purpose?


With respect to YACC(Bison)/LEX: It is possible to construct a parser
for Ada and pick out the constructs desired. There are copies of the
Ada syntax in various repositories - tho' I don't have their names.
However, it is probably 'cheaper' to look towards an existing toolset
for this capability. As a start, there is a Ada Static Code Analyser
at "Home of the Brave Ada Programmers" at http://www.adahome.com. You
can modify the code (I think that it's available) and change the reporting
requirements from an 'analysis' to whatever you want.

The rationale behind suggesting that a static code analyser be used is that
these analysers typically construct flow-graphs of programs and these flow-graphs
naturally partition using branch statements (goto's, conditionals, case statements,
looping constructs, etc.). It would then seem to be a good fit for your
application.

art schwarz
schwarza@gdls.com