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From: wheeler@ida.org (David Wheeler)
Subject: Re: adatags?
Date: 1997/09/12
Message-ID: <5vbo6e$gsb@news.ida.org>#1/1
X-Deja-AN: 271931144
References: <5v8k6n$pbs$1@netty.york.ac.uk>
Reply-To: dwheeler@ida.org
Organization: IDA, Alexandria, Virginia
Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada
Date: 1997-09-12T00:00:00+00:00
List-Id: <comp.lang.ada>


Oliver Kiddle (opk101@york.ac.uk) wrote:
: Does anyone know if there is a program like ctags except for Ada. A
: friend of mine thinks that there was such a program, called adatags
: which was posted to this group a while ago. I've tried, archie, ftp
: search, several web searches and have searched the PAL and Ada home
: pages with no success. 

The old Verdix Ada compiler included such a program (I believe it was
called a.tags).  If you can't find such a program, you can probably create
a program to generate tags from the output of a cross-reference generator.

I used it and found it useful, but there's an important limitation to
this system; it doesn't handle overloaded names well.
"tags" was created for C, and C doesn't permit the same function name
to be used for different publically-accessible functions (let's ignore
"static" for the moment).  This doesn't work well for any OO language
(C++, Ada95), since using the same method name is normal; it doesn't
even work when the language permits overloading with differentiation by
data types (i.e. Ada83).

--- David A. Wheeler
    dwheeler@ida.org