Re: ANNOUNCE: Avatox 1.0 is now available

["Randy Brukardt" <randy@rrsoftware.com>]

"Simon Wright" <simon@pushface.org> wrote in message
news:m264giacw2.fsf@grendel.local...
...
> I meant that ASISWG might be interested in 'sponsoring' a schema
> definition working party (as informal as you like!).

Possibly, but the responsibility for updating ASIS has been assigned to the
ARG. And judging by the reactions of the ARG when we actually started
working on that, the result will be very different than (but largely
compatible with) the existing ASIS.

The primary problem was that ASIS supposedly stands for Ada Semantic
Interface Standard, but it is virtually impossible to write portable ASIS to
do anything with the semantics of an Ada program. (Only the syntax of the
program can be practically analyzed.) It is reported that determining
whether a type is limited takes 96 lines of Ada (ASIS) code - but this is a
property that every Ada compiler has a subprogram to calculate. It should be
directly available in ASIS. Moreover, virtually everything in ASIS is
currently optional, which makes writing ASIS programs that are portable very
difficult. Plus, the standard itself is poorly written, and it's
organization is such that it is arguable that ASIS users (not to mention
implementers) need a license from ISO. So we're going to be busy redoing the
entire standard.

ASISWG will provide some guidance, but the main work will be done by the ARG
and it's ASIS editors.

                                Randy.