Re: Refactoring and Ada

[Volkert.Barr@freenet.de (Volkert)]

Paul Anderson <paul@grammatech.com> wrote in message news:<3C5AB0B7.9D75D49A@grammatech.com>...
>As part of a government research contract, we are developing a
>Refactoring editor for Ada.  I am interested in soliciting opinions
>from the group about Refactoring and Ada.
the idea is great! Especially the idea of doing the sematical 
preserving transformations with support of a tool. In my eyes, 
this all seems quite complex for Ada, but all Ada programers 
would like to see such a tool. 

>I am interested in finding out if there are any Ada projects out there
>that actively use refactoring.  If so, what refactorings do you use?
>Are they just like the Java ones, or are there features of Ada that
>mandate special-purpose refactorings?  What features would you like to
>see in a refactoring editor for Ada?
All the stuff like schema refactorings (consitant renaming and moving 
of packages, types, procedures, inherit, push_down/push up 
primitive operations, ...), function-to-procedure translation,
pattern integration ... but to my best knowledge, i don't know any 
documented refactorings for Ada in the quality of Martin Fowlers 
Refactoring-Book! 

Several month ago i asked in a german ada mailing list for support
to initiate an Ada Refactoring Tool. No interest. One person from 
R*ti*al mentioned, that their ApexTool can do most the refactoring 
stuff. I think, i was completely misunderstood about this topic.

To do more sophisticated refactorings in Ada you need a very good
a metamodel along with a set of transformation rules. A long
long way ... ASIS may be a good starting point, but makes in not
possible manipulate the Abstract Syntax Tree directly ...

Volkert Barr

--
barr@cs.tu-berlin.de
www.cs.tu-berlin.de/~barr