Re: ada95 and uml

["Mark T" <mt@nospam.com>]

>
> From my study of UML and my knowledge of Ada, I have concluded there is a
> substantial linguistic
> discontinuity.   Ada has a rich model of program development that cannot
be
> completely represented
> with UML.   Translating from UML to Ada or Ada to UML is guaranteed to
lose
> something in the
> translation.
>
> What we need is a modeling language for Ada that fills the requirement of
> linguistic
> continuity.   This is not only a problem with Ada.   Eiffel also maps
poorly
> to UML.  The Eiffel
> community has risen to the challenge and created a modeling language that
> maps well to Eiffel.

   UML (not most UML tools) is reasonably flexible and with proper
stereotyping and use of existing stereotypes like << utility>> one should be
able to create a reasonable mapping.  Also you may consider just using
higher order elements like <<subsystems>> for your modeling efforts. A
picture is still worth a thousand words especially when being introduced to
an existing complicated project for the first time.

I feel high level design should be as language independent as possible. If
UML needs more refinement so be it. Ada previously had a modeling notation
 Buhr I think it was called) but it didn't prove very popular and probably
doesn't need another.