Re: Refactoring and Ada

[dewar@gnat.com (Robert Dewar)]

"Nick Roberts" <nickroberts@adaos.worldonline.co.uk> wrote in message news:<a3hi78$18ga0c$1@ID-25716.news.dfncis.de>...
> Paul,
> 
> Ada has a co-standard called ASIS

I think it is just possible that Paul may have heard
of ASIS before :-) :-) :-)

> I suspect that, in the case of Ada, refactoring in 
> support of legacy code is unlikely in practice. This is 
> largely because Ada 95 contains virtually no
> incompatibilties with Ada 83, and added no features so 
> valuable that it would make it desirable to refactor Ada 
> 83 code to use those features.

A peculiar statement, since it represents such little
awareness of what actually goes on the field. In fact we
see many large users who are migrating large Ada 83 applications to
Ada 95, and I would guess exactly the
opposite that automated code transformations (I find the
term refactoring pompous :-) for, e.g. replacing certain
stylized uses of tasks in Ada 83 with protected types to
be potentially one of the most useful forms of this
technology. Certainly we have seen people write ASIS tools
to assist in transformations of this type.