Re: Ada95 Pretty-Printers

[gicca@alsys.com (Greg Gicca @pulsar)]

In <339DA006.228F@sprintmail.com> "John G. Volan" <johnvolan@sprintmail.com> writes:

>Samuel Mize wrote:
>> 
>> John G. Volan wrote:
>> > Are there any pretty-printers out there for Ada95?
>> 
>> This seems to come up every so often, and the answer so far has
>> been "not really."
>> 
>> I would suppose that one could be built using the AdaMagic front
>> end, but that's sheer speculation and I don't know how much it costs.

>I've been toying with the thought of doing it using GNAT's front end ...
>or maybe this would be a good application for ASIS ... hmm ... what's
>the status of ASIS & GNAT?  Gotta look that up ...

Just a note on the use of ASIS here...  ASIS is a great tool for
developing all sorts of software tools that need various information
on Ada source; stub generators, metrics evaluators, test case
generators, etc.

However, some data returned by ASIS is not identical to that which was
originally supplied in the source code.  One example might be named
numbers or constant values.  These may be stored simply as the value
at any point of reference.  Values specified using attributes may be
stored as actual numeric values instead of the original source text,
such as: Integer'First, Char'Pos, etc.

Due to the above, an ASIS based pretty-printer may produce semanticlly
equivelent code, but not the same source text as you might expect.

Having said that I would be interested in any tools that might exist
based on ASIS 2.0.  I have several from ASIS 1.1 and would like to see
what might exist for the new standard.

Greg
gicca@aonix.com