ASIS-for-GNAT Reference Manual

About This Manual

This Manual contains reference material for developers using ASIS-for-GNAT — GNAT’s implementation of the Ada Semantic Interface Specification (ASIS). It provides information about ASIS-for-GNAT’s implementation-specific¹ characteristics and current implementation limitations.

GNAT implements both Ada 95 and Ada 2005. As of January 2008, the ASIS standard is specific to Ada 95 and has not yet been updated to Ada 2005. Notwithstanding the status of the ASIS standard, ASIS-for-GNAT includes extensions that account for the new Ada 2005 functionality. You can therefore use ASIS-for-GNAT for Ada 2005 programs, keeping in mind that the Ada 2005-specific support may subsequently change as work on updating the ASIS standard proceeds.

For further information on ASIS-for-GNAT and Ada 2005, please refer to the auxiliary documents asis-2005-transition.txt and features-asis2005 in the ASIS source directory.

ASIS-for-GNAT also supports some of the language features proposed for the next language revision (Ada 2015), for more information please refer to the auxiliary document features-asis2015 in the ASIS source directory.

ASIS has been designed as a portable basis for many kinds of Ada code analysis tools. However, for situations where a developer may need to exploit the characteristics of a particular Ada compiler, ASIS also contains a number of implementation-specific features. These allow interfacing with the underlying Ada implementation, as well as exploiting the implementation permissions for particular queries.

Of course, any ASIS application that uses implementation-specific features may be nonportable. You should follow good programming practice and isolate and clearly document any sections of your program that make use of such features in a nonportable manner.

What This Manual Contains

This manual contains the following chapters:

• ASIS-for-GNAT and the ASIS Standard, describes the relationship between ASIS-for-GNAT and the existing ASIS International Standard.
• ASIS Extensions, describes the contents of the packages Asis.Extensions, Asis.Extensions.Flat_Kinds and Asis.Extensions.Iterator.
• Implementation-Specific Features and Implementation Permissions, presents the aspects of the ASIS definition that are implementation specific and describes their treatment in ASIS-for-GNAT.
• Debugging Information, describes the kinds of debugging information that you can generate with ASIS-for-GNAT.

What You Should Know Before Reading This Manual

This Reference Manual assumes that you are familiar with Ada 95 language as defined by the International Standard ISO/IEC-8652:1995, and with ASIS 95 as defined by the ASIS 95 International Standard ISO/IEC 15291:1999.

This Manual supplements the information presented in the ASIS-for-GNAT User’s Guide and uses the terminology introduced there.

Related Information

For more information, please refer to the following documents:

• GNAT User’s Guide
• ASIS-for-GNAT User’s Guide
• Ada 95 Reference Manual
• ASIS 95 Standard