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From: Niklas Holsti <niklas.holsti@tidorum.invalid>
Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada
Subject: Re: Any Suggestion How To Accomplish A Debug Macro?
Date: Sat, 03 Jan 2015 00:17:22 +0200
Organization: Tidorum Ltd
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Date: 2015-01-03T00:17:22+02:00
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On 15-01-02 23:52 , Randy Brukardt wrote:
> "Dmitry A. Kazakov" <mailbox@dmitry-kazakov.de> wrote in message
> news:fh7u81n706kr.131btl9yj1iz8.dlg@40tude.net...
>> On Fri, 02 Jan 2015 21:37:47 +0100, J-P. Rosen wrote:
> ...
>> However, it would be interesting to consider how tracing could be better
>> supported. I mean options:

   [snip]

>> 2. Ideas for the compilation units structure modification which would
>> allow
>> to have tracing code physically separated from the functional code.
>
> We've considered such ideas in the context of assertions, but nothing
> proposed really looked like a proper part of Ada.

Just a comment that this idea is approaching "aspect-oriented 
programming", AOP, which promised to be a radically new way to structure 
programs, as important as procedural abstraction. ("Aspect" here does 
not mean the same as in the Ada RM; see 
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aspect_%28computer_programming%29.)

In this case, the tracing would be its own aspect of the program's 
functionality, specified and implemented separately from the other 
"real" functionality.

It appears that, unfortunately, AOP was not as useful, or not as easy to 
design into programming languages, as was hoped, and the field seems to 
be not very active currently.

I found AOP an interesting idea because it feels like an intermediate or 
hybrid between procedural/imperative programming and declarative 
programming. AOP thus supports the Ada philosophy of favouring static 
descriptions/declarations of problem domain concepts, over dynamic 
coding, but on the other hand the implicit and automatic invocation of 
aspect operations, that is typical of AOP, may not be attractive for the 
safety-critical domain.

-- 
Niklas Holsti
Tidorum Ltd
niklas holsti tidorum fi
       .      @       .