Browsing an Ada Library

Ada-ASSURED provides a browser for easily locating and displaying declarations of named entities.

The browser uses a tags database generated by the utility programs aa.tags or maketags. Typically, the tags database contains information on all compilation units of an Ada library. More generally, the tags database can be configured to contain information about several Ada libraries, or information about only a portion of an Ada library. The database is loaded into Ada-ASSURED using command load-names.

Each entry in the database contains the name of a declared item, the filename and line number on which the declaration occurs, its sort, and its kind. The sort tells whether the declaration is a package, a procedure, a function, a type, an exception, a task, a protected type (in Ada 95), or an entry declaration. The kind tells whether the declaration is the body, the specification, a stub, or a generic.

The browser is controlled through the dialog box associated with the find-name command. Using this dialog box, it is possible to constrain the search by name, by sort, and by kind. By default, browsing is context sensitive; in particular, the context from which the find-name command was invoked influences the possible full-qualifications of names and the visibility of declared entities. This sensitivity can be overridden by buttons in the dialog box.

While find-name is the most general browsing command, numerous shortcuts are provided for more specific operations, including find-spec, find-definition, next-name, and previous-name.

Two shell commands are used to create the databases used for name-based browsing:

• aa.tags
• maketags

The name-based browsing commands in Ada-ASSURED are:

• find-definition
• find-name
• find-spec
• load-names
• next-name
• previous-name
• toggle-browse-as-TEXT