From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.4.4 (2020-01-24) on polar.synack.me X-Spam-Level: X-Spam-Status: No, score=-1.9 required=5.0 tests=BAYES_00 autolearn=ham autolearn_force=no version=3.4.4 X-Google-Thread: 103376,cbb5b0d14f503195 X-Google-Attributes: gid103376,public X-Google-Language: ENGLISH,ASCII-7-bit Path: g2news1.google.com!news3.google.com!news4.google.com!border1.nntp.dca.giganews.com!nntp.giganews.com!newsfeed00.sul.t-online.de!newsfeed01.sul.t-online.de!t-online.de!newsfeed.vmunix.org!peer-uk.news.demon.net!kibo.news.demon.net!news.demon.co.uk!demon!not-for-mail From: Simon Wright Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada Subject: Re: Working with incompetent adaists / unsafe typing war story Date: Fri, 17 Feb 2006 18:55:49 +0000 Organization: Pushface Message-ID: References: NNTP-Posting-Host: pogner.demon.co.uk Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii X-Trace: news.demon.co.uk 1140202526 25966 62.49.19.209 (17 Feb 2006 18:55:26 GMT) X-Complaints-To: abuse@demon.net NNTP-Posting-Date: Fri, 17 Feb 2006 18:55:26 +0000 (UTC) Cancel-Lock: sha1:NFENq8sumP6bDcd44AcXXL/O5AI= User-Agent: Gnus/5.11 (Gnus v5.11) Emacs/22.0.50 (darwin) Xref: g2news1.google.com comp.lang.ada:2937 Date: 2006-02-17T18:55:49+00:00 List-Id: writes: > At one point the person doing the demonstration said something such > as, "Well let's get rid of these limited private types since they > cannot be used for anything useful." He then continued with his > demonstration of the tool. On my project, we have been using a code generator whose runtime makes use of limited private abstract tagged types[1] where appropriate, and doing unit tests with AUnit. AUnit ends up with a lot of unit test code (seems to be about three times the operational code), so there's an interest in finding a more cost-effective tool (I rather think that what we want is a more cost-effective way of testing the code, which is not quite the same thing, but that's another story). At least one of the tools we looked at seemed to be incapable of dealing with limited and/or indefinite types. I only got called in as the eval was winding down, so I don't know the full story, but at least one possibility is that the market for fancy test support environments is one where limited and/or indefinite types are banned anyway, for safety-related reasons perhaps, so it's not a problem. But _I_ have a problem with an Ada test tool that can only handle a subset of Ada, and I'm reluctant to modify the code generator to produce Ada I'd be ashamed to write myself. I _have_ been modifying the code generator to provide better support for (AUnit-style) testing; for example, it can generate stub versions of packages where you can store the values of in parameters, specify the values returned via out parameters/function returns, and cause exceptions to happen, all with indefinite values (but not limited); implemented using streams. All easy enough if you're generating the code in the first place, probably more work with ASIS. [1] I think I got the order wrong there!