Ada-ASSURED 3.0 Release Notes

Introduction

GrammaTech, Inc. is pleased to announce Ada-ASSURED 3.0, released today. This release contains a number of improvements over Ada-ASSURED 2.2.2. This document describes these improvements.

New features

Motif

The most obvious change is that Ada-ASSURED 3.0 supports the Motif look and feel. Editor windows look significantly different than in previous versions. Key differences are:

The old message pane has been removed.
The transformations now appear by default in the menu bar under Transforms. The context pane is by default turned off.
A new pane, called the command pane is used to enter commands by name. The interface is similar to previous versions: the user simply uses TAB, types the name of the command, and hits RETURN to execute a command.
A new pane, called the status pane has been introduced. This is used in place of the old message pane to show error messages. In addition, it displays the syntactic category of the structural selection. This piece of information was previously displayed in the old context pane.
The context pane now displays the transformations in alphabetical order.
An alert box will pop up to display multi-line error messages.

Ada95

Ada-ASSURED 3.0 supports both Ada83 and Ada95. Separate executables are provided for each language. An option at install time defines which will be the default editor. The command aa takes the -language parameter that allows the user to override the default.

SG client

Ada-ASSURED 3.0 introduces an editor `remote-control' feature. The program sg-client can be used to remotely send scripts for execution to running editors. If no editor is running, then it can be used to start one up. This is useful for tool integration purposes. Other tools can use sg-client to read and write files, invoke editing actions, etc. See the manual page for sg-client and Chapter 12 of the manual for further details.

Capitalization enforcement

The capitalization enforcement feature has been strengthened. Previously the user could specify a capitalization rule, and then list identifiers that were exempt from that rule. Ada-ASSURED 3.0 allows the user to specify both syllables that are to have a given capitalization enforced, and also syllables that are to be entirely exempt from capitalization. For example, the user can specify that the syllable IO is to appear capitalized. All occurrences of IO in identifiers such as Text_IO, Low_Level_IO, my_io_package will appear capitalized no matter how they are input, or what global capitalization policy is in effect. In addition, the user can specify syllables or regular expressions that are to be exempt from capitalization. That is, they will appear exactly as they were input.

The MESSAGES view

Ada-ASSURED 3.0 now has only two views: BASEVIEW and MESSAGES. By default, MESSAGES contains the same information as did the ADA_ENFORCEMENT_ERRORS in previous versions. Each category of message (errors, violations, and indicators) can appear in any combination of these views.

Message Comments

Ada-ASSURED 3.0 introduces a feature that allows the user to specify that the text of certain comments is to appear in the MESSAGES view. The string valued enforcement parameter Message Comments controls this feature. If the first character of a comment is one of the characters in this string, then the comment will appear in MESSAGES. This feature can be used to document violation waivers.

Pprint

The interface to the pretty printing utility pprint has changed. It can now be used to print files as PostScript as well as text. See the manual page in Appendix C of the manual for full details.

Other changes

New enforcement parameters

Several new enforcement parameters have been introduced to enhance style enforcement and to support Ada 95. The new parameters are:

Display Errors, Display Violations, Display Indicators define which views messages are to appear in.
Message Comments defines which comments are to appear in the MESSAGES view.
Marker Comment Loc, Marker Comment Nest Level control whether marker comments are required in if statements.
Else Marker Comment Loc, Else Marker Comment Nest Level control whether marker comments are required with the else part of if statements.
Exported Protected Enforcement controls whether to flag exported protected items as violations (Ada95 only).
Exported Protected Enforcement controls whether to flag exported protected types as violations (Ada95 only).
Aliased Object Enforcement controls whether to flag the declaration of aliased objects as a violations (Ada95 only).
Capitalization Enforced (or Exempt) Syllables controls enforcement or exemption of capitalization of syllables in identifiers.

Browsing

Browsing of exception names has been introduced. The functionality of find-name has changed slightly. When a name is found to be ambiguous, the dialog box will appear to allow the user to resolve the ambiguity manually.

FLEXlm 4.1

Ada-ASSURED 3.0 uses the latest version of the FLEXlm license manager.

Discontinued features

Previous versions of Ada-ASSURED comprised three separate editors: a stripped down version (adaedit), the mainstream version (enfedit) and a version that supported an Ada design language (adledit). Due to lack of interest, adaedit and adledit have been discontinued. Some of the functionality of adledit will be incorporated into future releases of Ada-ASSURED.