Re: Refactoring and Ada

["Nick Roberts" <nickroberts@adaos.worldonline.co.uk>]

"Robert Dewar" <dewar@gnat.com> wrote in message
news:5ee5b646.0202030548.5c471636@posting.google.com...

> "Nick Roberts" <nickroberts@adaos.worldonline.co.uk> wrote in message
news:<a3hi78$18ga0c$1@ID-25716.news.dfncis.de>...
> > Paul,
> >
> > Ada has a co-standard called ASIS
>
> I think it is just possible that Paul may have heard
> of ASIS before :-) :-) :-)

I had no clue that Paul was so closely involved in ASIS. It was not an
attempt at humour, and I apologise for any misdirection or offence that may
have been given.

I might recall the well-known phenomenon that Internet forms of
communication lack many key 'cues' that we take for granted with other forms
of communication, and this can lead to strange instances of confusion at
times. On a Usenet newsgroup, the phrasing of a question can innocently (but
misleadingly) make the reader think the asker is not familiar with the
newsgroup's subject at all.

> > I suspect that, in the case of Ada, refactoring in
> > support of legacy code is unlikely in practice. This is
> > largely because Ada 95 contains virtually no
> > incompatibilties with Ada 83, and added no features so
> > valuable that it would make it desirable to refactor Ada
> > 83 code to use those features.
>
> A peculiar statement, since it represents such little
> awareness of what actually goes on the field. In fact we
> see many large users who are migrating large Ada 83 applications to
> Ada 95, and I would guess exactly the
> opposite that automated code transformations (I find the
> term refactoring pompous :-) for, e.g. replacing certain
> stylized uses of tasks in Ada 83 with protected types to
> be potentially one of the most useful forms of this
> technology. Certainly we have seen people write ASIS tools
> to assist in transformations of this type.

Robert, this comment seems to demonstrate your lack of understanding of the
difference between refactoring and automated code transformations in
general. I suspect that, actually, the task-to-protected-object
transformations you mention are only the latter.

--
Nick Roberts