Re: ASIS for MinGW GNAT

[Stephen Leake <stephen_leake@acm.org>]

Fionn mac Cuimhaill <invisible@hiding.from.spam> writes:

> Has anybody  successfully installed  Martin Krischik's ASIS for use by
> the latest MinGW GNAT (3.4.2)?

This is on my list of things to do, but I'm pretty overloaded at work
right now, so it won't be soon.

> I presume that this is a non-trivial project. Otherwise, it could
> reasonable expected to be already be a part of MinGW.

Yes. After I try it, I'll see what it would take to get it into the
MinGW distribution.

> Also, could somebody explain why ASIS is so sensitive to compiler
> versions?

Strictly speaking, "ASIS" is a standard that doesn't change (well, it
changes when the Ada standard changes). What is sensitive to compiler
versions is the application library commonly called "ASIS-for-GNAT",
which implements ASIS for the GNAT compiler.

In short, ASIS works by querying the compiler's internal data
structures. In the case of GNAT (and probably most compilers), those
data structures change (I hope only slightly !) for each release of
the compiler.

The input to ASIS-for-GNAT is the "tree" file dumped by the compiler.
That tree file is a serialization of the compiler's internal data
structures. Since the data structures change, the format of the tree
file changes, and ASIS-for-GNAT must change.

-- 
-- Stephe