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=-0.3 required=5.0 tests=BAYES_00, REPLYTO_WITHOUT_TO_CC autolearn=no autolearn_force=no version=3.4.4 X-Google-Language: ENGLISH,ASCII X-Google-Thread: 103376,f2a0e357565ca388 X-Google-Attributes: gid103376,public X-Google-ArrivalTime: 2003-03-25 02:24:14 PST Path: archiver1.google.com!news1.google.com!newsfeed.stanford.edu!logbridge.uoregon.edu!newsfeed.icl.net!newsfeed.fjserv.net!diablo.theplanet.net!news.indigo.ie!feeder.news.heanet.ie!not-for-mail Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada From: Colin_Paul_Gloster@ACM.org (Colin Paul Gloster) Subject: Re: case tools References: Reply-To: Colin_Paul_Gloster@ACM.org Message-ID: Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=iso-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit User-Agent: slrn/0.9.7.0 (SunOS) Organization: Dublin City University (DCU) Cache-Post-Path: ns2-ext.dcu.ie!unknown@camac.dcu.ie X-Cache: nntpcache 2.3.3 (see http://www.nntpcache.org/) Date: 25 Mar 2003 10:24:13 GMT NNTP-Posting-Date: 25 Mar 2003 10:24:13 GMT NNTP-Posting-Host: 136.206.1.1 X-Trace: 1048587853 reader.news.heanet.ie 178 [::ffff:136.206.1.1]:48694 Xref: archiver1.google.com comp.lang.ada:35676 Date: 2003-03-25T10:24:13+00:00 List-Id: Martin Dowie said: "There is a move within the AdaUK and led by Artisan (www.artisansw.com) to come up with standard UML<->Ada mappings, perhaps analogous to the mapping between IDL and Ada." Perhaps HRT-HOOD would be more useful than UML, or given the lamented prevalence of that fruit of Grady Booch's, Intecs HRT has been working on upgrading realtime UML specifications to be close to HRT-HOOD. It is not as if mapping between HOOD and Ada is hard! Simon Wright wrote: "I have probably said this before .. although I can see the value of an out-of-the-box mapping, to get projects started, I don't believe that the mapping appropriate to "my" project is necessarily appropriate to "yours"." Simon Wright may find some consolation in these statements from a fairly recent document on UML and Ada entitled "What are Ada Mapping rules & What is a Profile?" attributed to Derek Russell: "It would be na�ve however to assume that the mapping rules would be sufficient to cover all possible implementation requirements. There will be model specific mappings such as active class priorities, entry point semantics, etc. To accommodate such requirements, language specific annotations should be added to the model to allow specifics to be identified and enhance code generation. These annotations shall be in the form of stereotypes and tags and are known as the [bold bagan]profile[bold ended] (or [bold began]Ada profile[bold ended] in the case of the Ada community). The profile should override the mapping rules if applied to any modelling element." Simon Wright wrote: "I also think that the UML<-Ada part will prove challenging .. the Ada package is quite a hard concept to express in UML, and the idea of a generic signature is even more fun. To some extend this depends on the tool concerned .. UML allows, I think, the concept of a parameterised collaboration (generic package to you and me, I think) but Rose doesn't." >From the document attributed to Derek Russell: "The mapping from a UML design to an Ada implementation is not as obvious as some would think. The size of the Ada language leads to many different ways of implementing even a simple UML model. In addition, the UML notation (1.4) is often not rich enough to fully specify the designers intentions. [..] [..] In addition, it should be an aim that standard UML notation be applied wherever possible." "I think it is highly questionable whether every Ada construct should be representable in UML. For a start, it allows individual developers a lot of licence as to what architectural features they use, and you don't always want that; anyone who has seen the amazing code generation property sheets available in Rose and, I think, Rhapsody (don't know Artisan) will know what I mean." To some extent this might be okay with the "language specific annotations" mentioned earlier (but you do not want to spend forever banning almost everything from the COTS inital setup!) and with the dialects of Ada supported. From that document: "To avoid excessive model annotations, organisations (or toolset vendors) should define a set of rules for mapping UML modelling elements to the target language (SPARK, Ada83, Ada95 etc). These are termed mapping rules; a set of mapping rules should exist for each flavour of the target language. These mapping rules should provide the general, and most common, set of mappings."