The status of ASIS

General
1

I must admit being ignorant about ASIS. So my questions are:

  • What is the status of the standard?
  • Are the template packages here the actual stand of?
2

IIRC, it is [mostly] defunct, and IIRC only supports Ada 2005 (? maybe only Ada 95); or at least that’s how one of the big project’s authors seemed to be framing it —Adalog? Simon J Wright’s stuff? I’ve forgotten— and wanted to see it updated to support more modern Ada standards. That said, IIUC, it’s still quite usable, as AdaControl is still usable/used.

3

AFAIK…

It has not been updated since Ada 2005 (I believe it does not cover the full 2005 standard). It was removed from GCC/GNAT since… v10? AdaCore does continue to support it though for its customers (but I believe it is just maintenance, not really any development). There were proponents inside the AEiC and Ada Users Society to try to find stakeholders that would try to maintain it and update it for newer Ada versions. But alas, that has not happened and it does not look like it will…

Jean-Pierre Rosen published a paper in Ada-Europe a few years ago comparing ASIS and Libadalang and he did not find it satisfactory. However, libadalang has been improving and is flexible/can be scripted, soooo…

Best regards,
Fer

4

Thanks for responses guys.

(ASIS looked nicely structured to me. The only point I did not like was that elements were chosen to be subtypes rather than a tagged hierarchy. There is nothing wrong with subtypes if they were discriminated in order to select the specific node type. I see the reason - to avoid containers. But since the implementation would be a wrapped access type or handle anyway, one could make it a definite type.)

Having said that, what is the alternative? Very important projects need such a tool. E.g. Ada Control or an advanced DSA implementation…

5

It is decently structured; I think it could be refreshed/updated fairly easily, if the ARG were to adopt the metalanguage proposal I’m working on. — So, yes, the issue is under my consideration.

IFAIK, there is no real alternative, a lot of “the industry” has been infected with the C/Python/plain-text mentalities, where the solution is to push more work and complexity onto the user instead of solving the whole problem.

As far as old-tech goes, I think Ada would do really well with DIANA and ASIS — remember:

  • DIANA is about a good, uniform IR which stores the source as a structure (a DAG, which is also attributed), and is designed so that it cannot store non-syntactically-correct code.
  • ASIS is about querying and manipulating the [conceptual] structures.
  • These could be combined into a DB-engine such that the DIANA is the storage/data and the ASIS is the query-engine.