Re: ANNOUNCE: Avatox 1.0 is now available

["Marc A. Criley" <mcNOSPAM@mckae.com>]

Simon Wright wrote:
> I took the view that <A_DEFINING_NAME/> would look better as
> <defining_name/> throughout.

I try to adopt the prevailing style and idioms of a given programming or 
similar such language, hence the camelBack no underscore approach.

> There are also some interesting choices about which aspects to map
> into attributes and which into child elements, and indeed on the whole
> mapping to be used.

Basically, I mapped literals into attributes, like identifiers, operators, 
numbers, and such.

There are other possibilities, but I didn't want to have to maintain any 
kind of info stack to know what value to associate with a previous or 
subsequent element.  Like A_CLAUSE could've had the kind of clause--"with", 
"usePackage"--as an attribute.  Here it's all done in a single pass with no 
look back or look-ahead.

> Do you support multi-unit environments?

The current release of Avatox only processes the single compilation unit 
provided to it.  Extending that to a closure probably wouldn't be that hard.

The Avatox XML Format (AXF) would support multiple units as-is (v1.1 and 
beyond), you just keep adding them in.

> Do you think there'd be a future in offering at least the concept to
> the ASIS team?

I'm a little unclear on what concept you're referring to...an XML 
definition for Ada?

> As a demo of the sort of thing one can do, we found it pretty
> straightforward to generate a report ...

<snip>

The analysis and reporting aspect is definitely one area for Avatox, using 
stylesheets just as you've done.

My focus though is more on "Transformation & Vivification", i.e., 
transforming the XML representation using <buzzword>XML-enabled 
technologies</buzzword> and then bringing the result to life by some means, 
whether that be converting the XML back to Ada source code, or compiling it 
directly, or through some other animation.

I'm experimenting and watching to see where this goes...

-- Marc A. Criley
-- Mckae Technologies
-- www.mckae.com
-- DTraq - Avatox - XIA - XML EZ Out