Re: Ada 95 and UML.

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

In article <86qig5$5nu$1@newsfeed.esib.net>,
	"Peter Dencker" <dencker@aonix.de> wrote:

>You may contact Aonix in your vincinity. They have a tool called StP/UML
>which generates Ada 95 code out of your UML class and state transition
>diagrams.

Actually, it has been noted several times in this forum that UML does
not map all that well to Ada.  The most glaring difficulty is with
child library units, particularly private child library units. The
other difficulty is the Ada tasking model.  

Ada is not unique in this respect.  UML falls short when modeling certain
other languages:  Eiffel and Modula-3 come to mind.  But Ada is probably
the worst match since it departs from the C++ variants so radically. 

At the same time, UML contains some rich constructs that Ada fails to 
naturally express.  Until Ada achieves a larger following in industry,
there will be little incentive for anyone to develop a modeling notation
that fully expresses the power of Ada.  I think Ed Colbert was pursuing
this but I'm not sure of the status of his effort.  

Richard Riehle
richard@adaworks.com