Q14 - Standards Development Plan, Ada Interfaces to DIANA, Analysis and Recommendations
Abstract
Intermediate languages (IL) for Ada will be an important component of a robust Ada software engineering environment. The Descriptive Intermediate Attributed Notation for Ada (DIANA) is the best known and most fully explored Ada IL, and had been used as the basis of commercial Ada compilers. Unfortunately, commercially available compilers do not provide public interfaces to the Ada library, and so semantically analyzed Ada intermediate representations are not available to third party software tool developers. Nevertheless, public tool interfaces to Ada libraries in IL form must be considered an important component of the future STARS SEE. Peregrine Systems prototype DIANA implementation, put in the public domain by STARS, is the first publicly available Ada frontend which produces a well-defined IL, based upon the 1986 definition of DIANA. Given the importance of ILs to STARS, and the lack of available alternative IL implementations for STARS use, we confess to a bias to evaluate DIANA favorably as an interface formalism. Q14 expended considerable effort in testing, ruggedizing,and enhancing. As a result of these efforts Q14 considers the current DIANA prototype to be a reasonable basis for the development of prototype tools. (kr)
Document Details
- Document Type
- Technical Report
- Publication Date
- Mar 20, 1989
- Accession Number
- ADA228821