From: philippe@telesoft.com (Philippe Collard @pulsar)
Subject: Re: ASIS (Was Re: IrisAda)
Organization: Alsys Group, San Diego, CA, USA
Date: Fri, 22 Jan 1993 21:54:07 GMT



	Speaking for an Ada vendor, I disagree with Mike Ryer's
	assessment of ASIS. ASIS is not "everything that TeleSoft and
	Rational happen to have in their libraries". The current ASIS
	specification was agreed upon by the ASIS Working Group which
	includes many compiler users and compiler implementers. 
	TeleSoft and Rational contributed technology to the ASIS
	standard but many others had a say in what ASIS eventually
	became. The same is true for the future of ASIS and the
	current and future revision of the proposed standard are
	debated by a very active group (at meetings or through email).
	Thus I believe it is unfair to state that TeleSoft and/or
	Rational controlled the definition of the standard to suit
	their particular compiler architectures.

	I believe it is also unfair to say that implementing ASIS
	causes compiler to be slower and library to be larger. The
	RISCAda compiler for SPARC has excellent compile time
	performance relative to other SPARC compilers. On many 
	benchmarks run by customers, it came on top of all SPARC
	compilers. THis is an ASIS compliant compiler. 
	The size of the libraries for RISCAda compiler may be larger
	than for some other compilation systems but I have yet to talk
	to a customer for whom this has been a very significant
	problem. 

	I think Mike overlooks the most important benefit of the ASIS
	standard. Ever since Ada came onto the scene, the power of the
	language has been locked up in proprietary compilation library
	systems that only compiler vendors could have access to. Thus
	no other CASE tool vendors were able to exploit all the
	benefits of the Ada language. With ASIS, CASE tool vendors can
	develop Ada-smart tools that are not compiler
	vendor-dependent. That fact alone will provide an incentive to
	CASE vendors to build more Ada tools which, in turn, will
	contribute to the growth of our industry. Ada need to open up
	to the rest of the software world and ASIS is one of the
	keys that will allow that (as is A.O.I, the ALSYS interface
	that allows integration of Ada compilation systems at the
	control level). 

	As far as vendor support, TeleSoft and now the ALSYS Group do
	support ASIS. An ASIS toolkit is available from ALSYS for the
	RISCAda product and an ASIS interface will be available from
	ALSYS for the AdaWorld products in 1993. Also, at the meeting
	of the ASIS Working Group in July in Washington, Steve
	Zeigler, VP Eng. at Verdix, voiced his support for ASIS and
	made the statement that Verdix would support ASIS in the
	future (I am only stating here the position that Steve took at
	the meeting, for more details on Verdix position please talk
	to them :)

	ASIS has received enthusiastic support from the users
	community. From our standpoint, it has also been a commercial
	success. I believe that ASIS will be one key contributor to
	growing the Ada market and  developin the Ada community beyond its
	traditional boundaries. 

	The investment to implement ASIS will vary from vendor to
	vendor but I believe the pay-off is well worth it.

	Philippe Collard
	ALSYS
	Group Marketing
Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada