Re: User-defined access dereference

["Dave Adlam" <David.Adlam@AdlamSys.GlobalNet.co.uk>]

Stanley R. Allen wrote in message <3B7DAEA0.60043A96@gsde.hou.us.ray.com>...
>
>Language design.
>
>
>Now we are faced with another situation in which it would be nice to
replace
>".all".  This time, there are over 10,000 dereferences in over a million
lines
>of code, so it's out of the question to do to this code what was done to
the
>other code before.  (The latest issue is the need to error-check each
reference
>because it's possible for 'remote' references to have recoverable point
failures
>in a what is essentially 'reflected memory' for a Linux cluster.)
>
>
>Any thoughts?
>
>--
>Stanley Allen
>mailto:Stanley_R_Allen-NR@Raytheon.com

I once had to integrate actual flight software for the Cluster spacecraft
into the simulator for those spacecraft.  As there were four spacecraft in
the simulator, all references to package level declarations in the flight
software had to be modified.  Most of the variables and constants were
package level!

The approach that I used (and might be useful for you) was to write a
processor that parsed the Source code and converted it into what I needed.
The parser was not a full blown language parser, just enough to let me
recognise what I needed to find and modify.  The rest of the code was output
verbatim.  I only had to work on correctly compiled code, so there was no
error handling or recovery required in the parser.

If you have a million lines of code, then a similar approach might work.
And you now have the advantages of tools like the GNAT parser and ASIS,
which should make it easier.  I would suggest that you at least look at some
form of tool to automate the conversion.

Dave Adlam