ASIS-for-GNAT User's Guide: Introduction

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# 1. Introduction

> 1.1 What Is ASIS? |  |
> 1.2 ASIS Scope - Which Kinds of Tools Can Be Built with ASIS? |  |

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## 1.1 What Is ASIS?

The Ada Semantic Interface Specification (ASIS) is an open and published callable interface that allows a tool to access syntactic and semantic information about an Ada program, independent of the compilation environment that compiled the program.

Technically, ASIS comprises a hierarchy of Ada packages rooted at the package `Asis`. These packages define a set of Ada private types that model the components of an Ada program (e.g., declarations, statements, expressions) and their interrelationships. Operations for these types, called ASIS queries, give you statically determinable information about Ada compilation units in your environment.

You may use ASIS as a third-part Ada library to implement a number of useful program analysis tools.

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## 1.2 ASIS Scope - Which Kinds of Tools Can Be Built with ASIS?

The following ASIS properties define the ASIS scope:

- ASIS is a read-only interface.

- ASIS provides only statically-determinable information about Ada programs.

- ASIS provides access to the syntactic and basic semantic properties of compiled Ada units. If some semantic property of a program cannot be directly queried by means of ASIS queries, an ASIS application can compute the needed piece of information itself from the information available through ASIS queries.

- ASIS provides information from/about Ada units in high-level terms that conform with the Ada Reference Manual and that are Ada/ASIS-implementation-independent in nature.

Examples of tools that benefit from the ASIS interface include, but are not limited to: automated code monitors, browsers, call tree tools, code reformators, coding standards compliance tools, correctness verifiers, debuggers, dependency tree analysis tools, design tools, document generators, metrics tools, quality assessment tools, reverse engineering tools, re-engineering tools, style checkers, test tools, timing estimators, and translators.

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