Re: Ada and UML

[Brian Drummond <brian_drummond@btconnect.com>]

On Thu, 02 Sep 2010 03:18:11 +0200, Yannick Duch�ne (Hibou57)
<yannick_duchene@yahoo.fr> wrote:

>Le Wed, 01 Sep 2010 20:44:09 +0200, Simon Wright <simon@pushface.org> a  
>�crit:

>What I expect, may be explained with concrete cases.
>
>I feel for long source does not came with all value and sometime, the  
>�clever idea� in something comes at an abstract level which not any more  
>clearly visible in a source, even if the source implements this �clever  
>idea�.
...
>As an example, I have an FTP application written 5 years ago. Not so much  
>big, 2_000 lines. But I have to rework it, and although there are comments  
>and the design was clear at the time I wrote it, it seems impossible to be  
>sure to clearly understand what I had in mind at the time.
...
>And what if I ever want to re-implement these things in another language ?  
>(one is C, the other is Pascal and JS) A direct translation to Ada (which  
>I plan for the future) would surely turn into many errors every where.

One question possibly worth asking - is UML the right starting point for this
discussion?

It is certainly a candidate - but if the question is, how to capture the essence
of a design independent of the implementation (either before design, or
retrospectively to aid later understanding and possibly re-implementation) - is
it the only, or even the best candidate?

Others might be formal methods - Z or B, discussed here recently. It seems to me
they can be used to capture a specification and ruthlessly test it - but maybe
they cannot be easily applied in retrospect.
 
Or even Bon (which was mentioned here about a year ago). I had never heard of
it, so hunted down the recommended book via Amazon - second hand, ex-library.
It was pristine - it had never been borrowed...

I am probably the wrong persion to ask this question, having no practical
experience of any of these tools (beyond downloading and playing with a UML tool
set), but your post sounds so much like my internal debate that I am interested
in your thoughts.

UML appears to have more momentum and support than all the other options put
together - does that alone make it the right choice?

Or does it offer the best solution on its own merits?

Or does its (relative) popularity mean that a "better" candidate (B, perhaps) is
being overlooked?

- Brian