DVM: an object-oriented framework for building large distributed Ada systems
Proceedings of the conference on TRI-Ada '95: Ada's role in global markets: solutions for a changing complex world
| Hi-index | 0.00 |
This article presents a strategy to convert any Ada type to and from a byte stream, for the purpose of communication or storage of values in a heterogeneous environment:• different Ada compilers,• different hardware platforms with different "endian-ness,"• different versions of the same compiler,• or even different programming languages.These operations are sometimes called 'marshalling' and 'unmarshalling' (RM95 E.4(9)1).The strategy is systematically supported by a tool built on top of the Ada Semantic Interface Specification (ASIS)2, which builds or updates the conversion routines based on the type definitions.The strategy presented is similar to the Ada 95 mechanism of stream and stream-oriented attributes, however the tool applies to both Ada 83 and Ada 95 with only slight differences in the aspect of the source code generated.