Re: Kickstarter for beginning work on a new open-source Compiler

[Robert A Duff <bobduff@shell01.TheWorld.com>]

Simon Wright <simon@pushface.org> writes:

> Luke A. Guest <laguest@archeia.com> writes:
>> ASIS doesn't have Ada 2012 support, yet. Unless there are unofficial
>> extensions, do you have links?

The latest GNAT Pro ASIS fully supports Ada 2012.  I don't know if that
has made it into the GPL version yet.

It will likely be updated to support Ada 2022 (or whatever it will be)
when that comes along.

> translates (using ASIS GPL 2012 and my ASIS2XML) to

I didn't know about your ASIS2XML project until now.

Do you know about gnat2xml?  It is a similar tool produced by AdaCore.
(I wrote it.)  It is based on ASIS, and supports Ada 2012.
Looking at:

http://gnat-asis.sourceforge.net/pmwiki.php/Main/ASIS2XML

I see some differences:

gnat2xml has cross-links.  E.g. each name points to the declaration
it denotes, and each expression points to its type.

There is an XML schema, automatically generated by an ASIS-based tool
called gnat2xsd.

Each XML element has a "source location", which tells you the starting
and ending line and column numbers for the corresponding source text.
The root of the tree has various information, including the name
of the source file.
There is also a mode in which gnat2xml generates XML interspersed
with Ada source text, including comments.

I think XML is horrible.  But it has the advantage of being standard,
and everybody uses it, and there are all sorts of useful XML-based
tools out there.

- Bob