Re: Ada202X: Easy to use "UML private"-like components

[Simon Wright <simon@pushface.org>]

Martin <martin@thedowies.com> writes:

Hi Martin!

> On Friday, June 21, 2013 7:36:40 PM UTC+1, Robert A Duff wrote:

[stuff that Google Groups mangled even more horrifically than usual!]

> There are current options of how to achieve UML-like private-ness but
> all are clunky and some are horrific and, given their access-types not
> available for safety-critical systems (where coding standard still
> often forbid such usage).

Given that the UML private/protected distinction is only relevant to
inheritance, I'd have thought it would be irrelevant to safety-critical
systems!

Rational Rose used to have the additional visibility "implementation". I
took this to mean the same as "private" (and "protected").

> As to making Ada more UML-like, that's not really my goal...but I'd
> certainly like to make common UML constructs easy to achieve in Ada.

I have to ask, why? We have profiles to state what UML constructs will
have meaning in the translation, and what that meaning will be. Other
constructs - well, I'd forbid them on the grounds that no two team
members will have the same opinion as to what they mean, and they'll
probably get translated (if at all) into something different again.

> I had hoped a standard UML <-> Ada mapping could be agreed between the
> UML & Ada compiler tool vendors; certainly they all gave positive
> responses to such a move all those years ago. They all had company's
> developing their own Stereotype/Tag UML<->Ada solutions, so all saw
> this wheel being re-invented year after year, company after company.

Always seemed to me that people went overboard with that; why did they
feel the need to stereotype a class «Ada:Task» when it could just be
marked _active_? (actually, there is a reason for using a stereotype,
which is that tags are associated with stereotypes, and you'll need tags
for {priority} and {stack}; but why not use plain «active»?).

> Interest has been raised in UML/Ada recently

Oh, where?