Re: UML & Ada

[Richard D Riehle <laoXhai@ix.netcom.com>]

In article <35880034.68F8@cs.umd.edu>,
	Michael Stark <mstark@cs.umd.edu> wrote:

>Dennis Miller wrote:

-- snip snip snip
>
>But Ada 95 _is_ Ada, just as FORTRAN 77 superceded previous versions
>of FORTRAN to become _the_ standard.  Given this, I see no reason that
>you can't use UML with Ada, unless you are dealing with Ada 83 legacy
>code, in which case the answer is a resounding "it depends" ;)

-- snip snip snip

It would be nice if UML and Ada were a comfortable, easy fit.  This is 
not the case.  UML assumes that a class is a module and vice-versa much
as one would expect of Eiffel or C++.  In Ada, a module is a package. There
is not straightforward support in UML for child packages.  UML is at
the wrong level of granuality to support Ada's model for encapsulation 
and separation of specification from implementation.  There seem to be
a lot of disconnects between UML and Ada. 

What we need, for Ada, is an Ada-specific notation for object modeling, 
one which takes advantage of the power of Ada rather than the limitations
of C++.  I recall that Ed Colbert was working on a modeling notation that
would map to Ada.  I wonder if he is still pursuing this.  

Richard Riehle  
AdaWorks Software Engineering