Re: Are there any automatic tools to convert ada83 source to ada95?

[dewar@gnat.com]

In article <766lh7$dro$1@nnrp1.dejanews.com>,
  yaowei@tonghua.com.cn wrote:
> I have a large system written in ada83, I intend to
> transit it to ada95, Are
> there any automatic tools to perform this task? Any
> suggestion will be appreciated.


Well the first order reply to your question is yes, cp
(i.e. the copy command), since Ada 83 is pretty much
compatible with Ada 95. The actual situation is that going
to an Ada 95 compiler should be no more difficulty than
going to another Ada 83 compiler, which is to say it may
be almost no effort, if you have written carefully portable
code, to quite a lot of effort if you have not.

But generally we have found that people have had very good
success in the case of moving large applications to GNAT.
This is partly because we have designed GNAT to make this
port easy (all Ada 83 pragmas and attributes supported, and
a large selection of non-required rep clauses typically
found in Ada 83 programs recognized etc), but the task
should be reasonable no matter what Ada 95 compiler you
use. The one thing to be careful of is optional annexes.
GNAT implements all of them, but this is not true of other
Ada 95 compilers, and you should be sure to check that the
subset of annexes supported meets your needs. For example
if you have a real time application that depends on
priorities, make sure the real time annex is supported.

Now if you are asking the more difficult question of
whether there are tools to help you transition the *style*
of your code to take more advantage of Ada 95 features,
such as tagged types, and protected objects, then I know of
no such tools, and I doubt in practice that it would be
practical to create tools of this kind that were really
useful. Generally the best approach is to transition your
Ada 83 application to Ada 95 with minimal changes, then to
gradually introduce Ada 95 features as they make sense.

Robert Dewar
Ada Core Technologies

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