intro.htm

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Introduction


What is Understand for Ada?

Understand for Ada is a tool for helping programmers and teams of programmers understand their Ada software projects.

Understand for Ada analyzes your Ada software to create a repository of the relations and structures contained within it. The repository is then used to learn about anything you are looking at in the source code.

Understand for Ada helps you quickly answer questions such as:

- What is this entity?
- Where is it changed?
- Where is it referenced?
- Who depends on it?
- What does it depend on?

Understand for Ada answers these questions through interactive entity specific cross reference reports and graphical diagrams quickly showing the relevant information about a given entity.

Ada Versions Supported

Understand for Ada supports Ada83 and Ada95 code, separately, or in combination.

Note: Scientific Toolworks, Inc. also offers similar tools for C/C++ and Fortran.

Use the Server Mode To Integrate With Your IDE

Understand for Ada is designed to be used both for stand alone browsing/discovery as well as browsing that is controlled from another application.

You can control Understand for Ada from any editor or program where you can launch a simple program called "understand_ada". The client accepts action commands for an entity name, and optional file, line, column specifiers.

understand_ada -name entityname
[-file filename -line line -col column]
-actionCommand

Where:

· entityname is the name of the entity you wish to learn about
· filename is an optional argument of where you are looking at the entity
· line is optional argument indicating what line number in that file
· column is an optional argument indicating what column of that line
· actionCommand is the action you wish to perform on the entity

For example:

understand_ada -name afunction -file mypkg.adb -line 15 -ib

will tell Understand for Ada to update the Info Browser window with information about function afunction as seen in file mypkg.adb on line 15.

Refer to Understand Client for details on using understand_ada. For example:

For those who don't like to read manuals

If you are like many engineers at Scientific Toolworks, you like to just plow in and get going with software. We encourage that, or at least we are pragmatic enough to know you will do it anyway! So feel free to use this manual as a safety net, or to find the less obvious features. However, before you depart the manual, read the remaining sections of this chapter for tips on effectively utilizing what Understand has to offer.

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