Re: General informations about ASIS

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

[-- Warning: decoded text below may be mangled, UTF-8 assumed --]
[-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 2792 bytes --]

"Hibou57 (Yannick Duch�ne)" <yannick_duchene@yahoo.fr> wrote in message 
news:6a692bc8-5989-404c-8bfb-593f23c21070@w1g2000prm.googlegroups.com...
> o The first one is : is there an official ASIS 2005 ? I've heard about
> AdaCore working on this, but I was not able to know if theire work
> bcomes the new standard.

Not yet. The plan is that the work on the standard will be finished at the 
next ARG meeting (next week) and then it will start the standardization 
process.

> o There are ASIS 2005 declaration packages in some Debian
> distribution : are these declarations the one of an official ASIS
> 2005 ? What is the status of declarations which seems to indeed
> enumerates all kind of Ada constructs.

Most of the technical decisions for the revised ASIS were done months or 
years ago and can be found on the ARG's website. The draft standard itself, 
unfortunately, is copyright ISO (as is the 1999 version) and thus cannot be 
provided except to people actively working on it. (The reason I'm here 
tonight is to finish that draft and get it distributed before the meeting.)

> o The third question : what is the content of the ISO/IEC 15291:1999
> document ? Is it the same as theses declarations which I could see on
> some place ? Are they some specific materials which cannot be found
> elsewhere ? (I was trying to figure out if wiether or not it would be
> interesting to me to save some money to order this a futur day)

Well, it describes the use of the functions, and there are some examples and 
rationale. Most of that should never have been in the standard in the first 
place, it should have been made freely available -- but it is too late to 
fix that.

> o Fourth, there is a ISO/IEC 15291:1999, which does not seems to apply
> to Ada 2005. If I did not found any reference about an ISO standard
> for an hypothetical ASIS 2005, does it mean there is no official ASIS
> 2005 ?

This is the same as your first question, and it has the same answer.

> o Fith : what is the legal status of these ASIS declarations ? Is it a
> public standard (although apparently none-free, it may still be
> public, this would not be contradictory)

I can't answer that, because we're not sure. The group that did that 
standard has long since disbanded, and as far as we can tell, they didn't 
pay any attention to intellectual property/licensing/copyright issues. 
Personally, I think they intended the specs to be public domain or something 
like that, but it isn't clear that they took the needed steps to ensure that 
is actually true. You'd have to ask a lawyer if you need a definitive 
opinion.

We've tried to address this by restructuring the standard, but whether that 
really works is an open question.

                                                   Randy.