Re: Migration to Ada95

[dewar@cs.nyu.edu (Robert Dewar)]

Lars asks

"I have a project where we consider migrating from Ada83 to Ada95. As
the system to be 'ported' is large and complex, I would like to do
more that just try and compile it. I have heard that some tools exists
that could help me in this job so what I'm looking for is a
scanner/parser that I can put my code through and which will give me
indications of critical constructions."

We now have quite a bit of experience in such ports for reasonably
complex programs (the largest so far was over half a million lins
of code).

In such porting efforts, we see that Ada 83 to Ada 95 incompatibilities
are a rather small part of the effort in doing such ports, and the subset
of such incompatibilities that is not immediately detected by the Ada 95
compiler is vanishingly small.

So in fact I think a tool of the kind you are looking for will be of
minimal assistance. Porting any large and complex system from one Ada
compiler to another (e.g. from one Ada 83 to another Ada 83 compiler)
is not likely to be a trivial task, but should be fairly straightforward
if the code is well written, and the fact that the target compilr is 95 
rather than 83 wlil have minimal impact on this difficulty.