Comparison : Ada and UML (comparison… indeed)

["Yannick Duchêne (Hibou57)" <yannick_duchene@yahoo.fr>]

Hello all,

Back to a famous topic of OO with Ada vs OO with other languages; just  
that here, let's replace “other languages” by UML.

Recall of the case (exposed in many places to show how Ada in more cleanly  
OO than so called pure-OO languages) : Let A and B be two classes. A  
defines a method “bool A::compare (A other);” (is that OK for the syntax ?  
… I forget so much about C-plus-plus). Then, B  
inherits/extends/specializes A, and thus get a method which is “bool  
B::compare (B other);”. But the concrete corresponding ones would be from  
Ada's point of view : “function Compare (Left, Righ : A) return Boolean;”  
in A class, and “function Compare (Left : B, Right : A) return Boolean;”  
in B class. Indeed, the receiver of the message in the case of B, is of  
type B, while the parameter is still of type A, as defined in A (Eiffel  
solved this with the “like” keyword if my mind is right).

OK, very nice, this shows how much Ada is superior at OO (and Eiffel two)  
than other pure-OO languages; but that is not the topic : UML seems to do  
the same! And I just wonder if it can do another way. I wonder about it  
for a personal purpose : I am actually trying to design a personal  
transformation from UML to Ada. But I am not so much sure UML is good  
enough for the purpose of modeling, while it has some interesting traits  
(like popularity, availability of editors, and so on).

This use to be a topic here, when we talked about class and package in Ada  
vs UML. This one question is another one, which troubles me even a degree  
above the one of packages and classes.

By the way, if some ones can tell about HOOD here… (I am talking about  
abstract model so far, not method). How HOOD would represent this ? With  
the same flaws or not ? (there are provision with Eclipse's Meta Language  
framework, to create something based on HOOD I believe, if ever it prove  
to be better here).

This is a symptomatic question to me.