A framework for designing and implementing the Ada standard container library

  • Authors:

  • Jordi Marco;Xavier Franch

  • Affiliations:

  • Universitat Politècnicade Catalunya, Barcelona, Spain;Universitat Politècnicade Catalunya, Barcelona, Spain

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 2003 annual ACM SIGAda international conference on Ada: the engineering of correct and reliable software for real-time & distributed systems using ada and related technologies
  • Year:
  • 2003

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Abstract

An open issue of the Ada language is the definition of a standard container library. Containers in this library (e.g., sets, maps and lists) shall offer some core functionalities that characterise their behaviour (i.e., different strategies for managing the elements stored therein) as well as other general functionalities. Among these general functionalities, we are interested in alternative ways for accessing the containers, namely direct access by position and traversals using iterators. In this paper, we present the Shortcut-Based Framework (SBF), a framework aimed at providing suitable, uniform, accurate and secure access by position and iterators, while keeping other nice properties such as comprehensibility and changeability. The SBF should be considered as a baseline upon which the Ada standard container library can be built. We assess the feasibility of our proposal defining a quality model for container libraries and evaluating the SBF using some metrics defined with the Goal-Question-Metric approach.