Ada-ASSURED 3.2 Release Notes

Introduction

GrammaTech, Inc. is pleased to announce the new release of Ada-ASSURED 3.2. This release contains a number of improvements over Ada-ASSURED 3.1. This document describes these improvements.

Ada Utilities

GrammaTech is proud to announce its new product, Ada-Utilities, which is an integrated collection of tools for analysis, transformation, and pretty printing of Ada 83 and Ada 95 code. The tools include:

Ada-Audit: Ada-Audit is a tool for creating, viewing, and maintaining a database of style and standards violations. Ada-Audit is delivered with definitions keyed to the Software Productivity Consortium (SPC) Ada Quality and Style Guidelines for Professional Programmers, and can be extended with customizations for your product.
Ada-Prettyprint: Ada-Prettyprint is a high-quality pretty printer for Ada 83 and Ada 95. Ada-Prettyprint follows the presentation rules of the SPC Guidelines; however, it may be tailored to follow your project's coding standards.
Ada-Grep: Ada-Grep is an Ada language-sensitive version of the UNIX grep utility that supports structured searches of source code based on the constructs in the Ada language.
Batch Mode: Ada-Utilities allows the user to run Ada-ASSURED in batch mode. The batch operation of Ada-ASSURED is controlled via the Ada-ASSURED Scripting Language, Scheme. The Scripting Language provides programmatic access to Ada code as an abstract syntax tree. Using the Scripting Language, you can analyze and transform Ada code using structural, rather than textual, operations.

Integrations

We are pleased to announce the extensive integrations between Ada-ASSURED and several other development tools:

Aonix ObjectAda development environment
Green Hills MULTI development environment
Cayenne TeamWork design tool

The integrations provide direct navigation between source code elements in Ada-ASSURED and operations in each of the integrated environments.

Aonix ObjectAda

The Aonix ObjectAda development environment provides an excellent Ada83 and Ada95 compiler and tools for navigating through Ada source code. The tight integration from Ada-ASSURED to ObjectAda facilitates the compilation, navigation, and understanding of a source code library being developed or maintained.

compilation: From within Ada-ASSURED, you can easily invoke the ObjectAda compiler and jump directly from a list of compilation errors to the corresponding lines of source code.
navigation: Using information stored during compilation, Ada-ASSURED enables you to find the declaration and uses of a code element.
understanding: To help understand the source code, Ada-ASSURED and ObjectAda can show you the call graph, dependency graph, and type hierarchy of a particular code element.

See the online Ada-ASSURED-ObjectAda Integration help system for more details.

MULTI

The Green Hills MULTI development environment provides high quality Ada83 and Ada95 compilers, a configuration management system, and navigation tools for a library of Ada source code. The tight integration between MULTI and Ada-ASSURED facilitates the compilation, version control, navigation, and understanding of a source code library being developed or maintained.

compilation: From within Ada-ASSURED, you can easily invoke the MULTI compiler and jump directly from a list of compilation errors to the corresponding lines of source code.
configuration management: You can access all the MULTI configuration management commands from within Ada-ASSURED. This makes it faster to check files in and out, and view differences in the source code between versions.
navigation: Using information stored during compilation, Ada-ASSURED enables you to find the declaration and uses of a code element.
understanding: To help understand the source code, Ada-ASSURED and MULTI can show you the call graph, dependency graph, and type hierarchy of a particular code element.

See the online Ada-ASSURED-MULTI Integration help system for more details.

TeamWork

In addition to the integration with TeamWork version 6, we now offer an integration with version 7. The integration with the new version contains the same functionality as the older TeamWork integration.

New features

Online Documentation

All Ada-ASSURED documentation is now available online in HTML format. This includes:

Read Me First
Release Notes
Installation Guide
User Guide And Reference Manual
Tutorial

New Web Browser Protocol

A specialized protocol for communication between the web browser eMosaic and Ada-ASSURED allows a hotlink in eMosaic to bring up a file within Ada-ASSURED. This feature in used in the Ada-Audit product.

Improved Customizability of Error Messages

It is now possible to dynamically change the text of error, violation, or indicator diagnostic messages via the scripting language. See function sg:change-diagnostic-message!

New Enforcement Parameter: Blank Before Left Paren

A new enforcement parameter Blank Before Left Paren has been added to control pretty-printing of Ada constructs that contain a left parenthesis.

Subtype Declaration Alignment

Previous versions of Ada-ASSURED did not align subtype declarations. This feature has been added, so that type and subtype declarations are consistently formatted and aligned on the is keyword.

Form Feed Characters

Ada-ASSURED will preserve form-feed characters in the input file. In addition, new transforms permit adding form-feed characters interactively.

Improved Context-Sensitive Help

The improved the context-sensitive help makes it is easy to navigate from any Ada construct in the source code (e.g., a case-statement or machine code directive) directly to the corresponding section of the Ada 83 or Ada 95 Language Reference Manual.

To use this feature, position the insertion cursor on any source code element. The context field in the the left right corner of the editor window will show the name of the current Ada construct. The menu Help / Describe Context will bring up the corresponding section of the LRM.

Scripting Language Changes

We have added the following additional Scheme functions and variables:

sg:change-diagnostic-message!
sg:cwd
sg:get-selection-end
sg:get-selection-start
sg:get-structural-selection-end
sg:get-structural-selection-start
sg:is-aa83
sg:is-aa95
sg:make-selection-dialog
sg:ordered-traverse
sg:preserve-tabs
sg:raise-window!
sg:string->term
sg:term->string
sg:term-xline-max
sg:term-xline-min
sg:write-permission?

See the Scripting Language chapter for details.

Other changes

Shell scripts: All shell scripts included with Ada-ASSURED (e.g., install, aa, pprint, mk_license) are now in sh instead of csh. This makes them more reliable across various architectures.
New version of STk: We now use STk version 3.1.1 instead of version 3.0b2.

Bug Fixes

Ada-ASSURED 3.2 contains many fixes and improvements. This section lists the more serious bugs that have been fixed.

Fixed bug in pretty-printing of record types. This bug caused the is keyword to occasionally be placed on a separate line from the record keyword.
Several bugs in text-replace and structure-replace have been fixed. These bugs caused intermittent crashes with text paste, and with the sg:replace! Scheme function.
Tabs were too large in TEXT mode.
The font in the status pane was too large with default text size of 18 pt.
Set structural selection command had bug that caused crashes in interactive editing, and using the Scheme function sg:set-structural-selection!.
The command cd did not cause the default directory to change for commands such as save-as and open.
No warning message was issued if a user tried to open a file that was already open.
Ada-ASSURED keyboard macros did not record search and replace commands.
The command kill-to-end-of-line had a bug that caused crashes in interactive editing.
Scheme function sg:replace!:
- Used to force the left hand side value to be at a resting place.
- Fixed bug that caused list replacements to fail.
- Fixed type checking bug of replacement term or primitive.