AdaBrowse 1.5 available

[Thomas Wolf <t_wolf@angelfire.com>]

AdaBrowse is a HTML documentation generator for Ada 95 library
unit specs, similar to what javadoc does for Java.

AdaBrowse is GPLed and available at the URL

<http://home.tiscalinet.ch/t_wolf/tw/ada95/adabrowse/>,
 
both a pre-built executable (for Win NT/2k and GNAT 3.14p), and the
sources.

An example of what AdaBrowse can do is at the URL
<http://home.tiscalinet.ch/t_wolf/tw/ada95/util/doc/>.

AdaBrowse is a command-line utility; it has no graphical user
interface. It is highly configurable through command line options,
style sheets, and configuration files.

AdaBrowse takes apart the Ada 95 source and produces a structured
and extensively cross-referenced HTML documentation from it. It
extracts Ada comments and generates formatted descriptions from them.
For packages, it also produces a (cross-linked) type index containing
links to the primitive operations of the types.

AdaBrowse uses ASIS to gather semantic information about a library
unit spec. It can handle whole libraries and produce global unit,
subprogram, and type indices for all library units.

AdaBrowse has been extensively tested on many publicly available
Ada 95 libraries and specially constructed test cases (in total
more than 1000 Ada 95 library unit specs).

V1.5 has been improved in many ways over the last announced V1.2,
including:

- some bug fixes, and more work-arounds for bugs in ASIS-for-GNAT.
- support for krunched file names.
- index generation for units, subprograms, and types.

AdaBrowse builds and runs without further ado on both Win NT/2k
and Unix systems, and shouldn't be too hard to port to other ASIS
implementations than ASIS-for-GNAT.

The distribution comes with a comprehensive user's guide including
examples and instructions on how and where to submit bug reports.

AdaBrowse differs from gnathtml in several ways:

- AdaBrowse is a stand-alone executable; gnathtml is a perl script.
- AdaBrowse is more flexible, and can be customized to a much
  greater extent.
- AdaBrowse produces structured HTML output including formatted
  descriptions; gnathtml basically just encloses the source in
  <PRE></PRE> tags and adds cross-references.
- AdaBrowse uses ASIS to collect cross-reference information,
  whereas gnathtml relies on the GNAT-specific cross-reference
  info in the ALI files.
- AdaBrowse uses ASIS to gather semantic information about library
  units and makes use of it, e.g. to find all the primitive operations
  of a type.
- AdaBrowse can call e.g. a compiler if no ASIS information is found,
  whereas gnathtml doesn't generate cross-references if no ALI file
  is found.
- AdaBrowse does some limited form of pretty-printing, such as using
  identifiers as cased in their definition everywhere.

-- 
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Thomas Wolf                          e-mail: t_wolf@angelfire.com