Re: Obtaining access to protected object

["Randy Brukardt" <randy@rrsoftware.com>]

"Maciej Sobczak" <see.my.homepage@gmail.com> wrote in message 
news:d234e827-c3e6-481a-a15e-94382c2fbf6c@d77g2000hsb.googlegroups.com...
...
> [*] What about ACATS? My code example looks like a unit test derived
> directly from AARM.

The Ada 95 ACATS writers made a rather fundamental mistake, in that they 
made no attempt to look at whether rules inherited from Ada 83 were tested 
properly. One result of that is that kinds of types added in Ada 95 
(modular, decimal, protected) types are not tested much with the basic rules 
of the language in the ACATS. (Another error that they made was to consider 
a paragraph covered if any rule in the paragraph is tested -- but there are 
a lot of paragraphs with multiple rules.)

The current ACATS work includes going back and restarting the coverage 
analysis from first principles. I'm finding that the coverage of the 
Standard in the ACATS is around 60% (far less than the Ada 95 contractors 
claimed). I doubt that given the current ACATS budget that this situation is 
going to change much -- I'm primarily emphasizing Ada 2005 changes for new 
tests.

Anyone can help, however, by submitting candidate ACATS tests. (I recommend 
doing so to complete untested test objectives where those have already been 
created for the full language, as that would increase the chances of a test 
being used in the ACATS.) Information on how to create tests can be found in 
the ACATS documentation - look at http://www.ada-auth.org/acats.html to find 
that. (I'm too busy at the moment to look up the exact link.) Feel free to 
contact me if you are interested and/or have questions. (Also, you can ask 
me for the most recent test objectives for a section of interest, as the 
ones available with the ACATS distribution are pretty stale.)

                                                       Randy.