Re: UML & Ada

["Marin David Condic" <dont.bother.mcondic.auntie.spam@[acm.org>]

Yes, I recall Buhr's diagrams - I believe this was the basis for the Adagen
tool once being marketed by a company called Mark V systems. Probably others
as well - I think Software thru Pictures used this at one point.

Why not just write Ada? Easy! In fairly large systems, you often want to
understand things like how the whole system "hangs together" - the
heierarchy, what is using what, etc. Seeing a bunch of little icons
representing packages and having arrows between them can help with that sort
of overview. I like the concept of having a design tool that will filter out
levels of detail so you can increasinly push down into a design seeing more
and more as you need to. (Ultimately getting to the code.)

Maybe I want to start viewing a system as a set of "major" packages
(subsystems) to which certain responsibilities are assigned. These may break
down into sub-packages that flesh out more of the implementation details of
how those responsibilities are handled. From there, I may be interested in
seeing just the subprogram names of a package interface to see what is
callable within a given context. Pushing deeper, I'd want to see types and
objects made available in the spec. Pushing further into a package, I might
then want to see what the body provides, etc., etc., until I get down to the
code.

One of the problems with most of the tools I've encountered that let you
construct some flavor of a diagramatic representation of a program (in any
language) is that at some point, it is taking you more time to arrange icons
on the diagram than it would be to simply type the code. Providing a means
of typing the code & reverse engineering the diagrams has its own problems
in that the instant the code gets more complex than the "hello world"
examples, the diagrams that result get butt-ugly and you have to spend a
bunch of time rearranging them. And of course having rearranged them, you
can't generally re-generate the diagrams from modified code without messing
the whole works up again.

I don't know of any available tools out there that still provide Buhr
diagrams and the ones I used to know of never really did all the things I'd
like to have seen. Still, if something like the Visual Thought tool (see
http://www.confluent.com/) supported Buhr diagrams (or similar), at least
you could sketch-out an overview of what you intended to build (or already
found and need to document)

--
Marin David Condic
Senior Software Engineer
Pace Micro Technology Americas    www.pacemicro.com
Enabling the digital revolution
e-Mail:    marin.condic@pacemicro.com
Web:      http://www.mcondic.com/


"Simon Wright" <simon@pushface.org> wrote in message
news:x7v4rnkfwgp.fsf@smaug.pushface.org...
> "Marin David Condic" <dont.bother.mcondic.auntie.spam@[acm.org> writes:
>
> I don't know if you ever saw Raymond Buhr's book System Design with
> Ada (83)? He had a notation for every possible construct, it seemed, I
> could never see the point, why not just write Ada!
>
> Every description of a program has to leave something out; even the
> code typically doesn't show the intent (well, not formally).
>