| To | Designated National Body Points of Contact |
| cc | WG9 Email Distribution List |
| From | Jim Moore, Acting Convener, ISO/IEC JTC1/SC22/WG9 (Ada) |
| Date | 16 December 1996 |
| Subject | Ballot on Working Draft of ASIS Draft Specification |
As decided at Meeting #30 of WG9 in June 1996, the review of a Working Draft for Project 22.15291, Ada Semantic Interface Specification (ASIS) will be performed by a letter ballot of national bodies. A plan for conducting the ballot was approved at Meeting #31 in December 1996 and the acting convener was tasked to initiate the ballot.
The reason for this procedure is to permit the national bodies to perform a single, complete review of the document rather than numerous superficial reviews. The ballot will be conducted by email, although I am certainly willing to make other arrangements whenever necessary.
The following national bodies have indicated their intention to participate in this ballot and have designated Points of Contact as shown below:
Of course, other national body members of WG9 are encouraged to ballot. It is only necessary to advise me of the individual selected to be the Point of Contact.
The ASIS Working Draft is available through both the ftp site: "sw-eng.falls-church.va.us" in "public/AdaIC/work-grp/asiswg/asis/v2.0". Or through the ASIS Home Page "http://www.acm.org/sigada/WG/asiswg".
The ASIS Working Draft consists of 3 Microsoft Word files:
This version is denoted ASIS Version 2.0.k, dated 7 December 1996. A Microsoft Word viewer is available in the public domain through: "http://www.microsoft.com/word/Internet/Viewer/default.html".
Floppy disks containing the ASIS Working Draft were distributed at the meeting. Postscript and ASCII versions will also be available on the home page.
A suggested format for comments is described in the front matter of the draft document. For the purpose of this ballot, the format should be supplemented with an indication of whether a particular comment is BINDING or NON-BINDING. Non-binding comments are merely suggestions for improvement of the document. Binding comments are those changes that you require before your national body will vote affirmatively. An affirmative ballot or an abstention would include only non-binding comments. Only a negative ballot would include binding comments.
The ballot must be submitted on or before 1 March 1997. The ballot must identify the submitter and the represented national body and indicate whether the vote is Affirmative, Negative or Abstention. If the ballot is negative, one or more binding comments must be included.
The ballot should be sent via email to:
Ballots will be acknowledged as received.
The document must be considered with respect to the requirements of the New Work Item authorizing the project. The text of the entire NWI can be found on the ASIS home page, "http://www.acm.org/sigada/WG/asiswg". For your convenience, excerpts from the key portions of the NWI are appended to this note.
Reviewers may also wish to consult the relevant portion of the (draft) minutes of meeting #31.
After receipt of the ballots, the ASIS Project Editor will prepare a Working Draft in accordance with the comments in the ballot and prepare a Comment Disposition Report for consideration at Meeting #32. The Comment Disposition Report should be prepared and circulated by May 1. Approval of the Comment Disposition Report at Meeting #32 will authorize the Convener to forward the Working Draft to SC22 for CD registration.
Ada Semantic Interface Specification (ASIS)
Standardize the interface between an Ada environment as defined by ISO/IEC 8652 (the Ada95 Reference Manual) and tools/applications requiring information from this environment.
The Ada Semantic Interface Specification (ASIS) is an interface between an Ada environment as defined by ISO/IEC 8652 (the Ada95 Reference Manual) and any tool requiring information from this environment. An Ada environment includes valuable semantic and syntactic information. ASIS is an open and published callable interface which gives CASE tool and application developers access to this information. ASIS has been designed to be independent of underlying Ada environment implementations, thus supporting portability of software engineering tools while relieving tool developers from having to understand the complexities of an Ada environment's proprietary internal representation.
As an international standard, ASIS will benefit the Information Technology community by facilitating the development of powerful CASE tools that are portable across various Ada environment implementations. An ASIS standard will promote the development of powerful tools for the software engineering community by providing access to important semantic and syntactic information otherwise available only through proprietary interfaces. Further, ASIS will benefit the Information Technology community as a valuable resource for application development. The international standardization of ASIS will facilitate the use of this important capability in the development of system software applications.
If the proposed new work item is approved, which of the following document(s) is (are) expected to be developed?
_X_ a single International Standard
_ _ more than one International Standard (expected number: ____)
_ _ a multi-part international Standard consisting of ____ parts
_ _ an addendum or addenda to [an existing] Standard
_ _ a technical report, type ...........................
Cooperation will be with the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Special Interest Group on Ada (SIGAda), Ada Semantic Interface Specification (ASIS) Working Group (ASISWG). The ASISWG has developed the ASIS interface to the Ada87 program library (ASIS V1.1.1) and is chartered to evolve this interface to support the new ISO/IEC 8652:1995 Ada95 standard. WG9 has established the ASIS Rapporteur Group (ASISRG) to achieve the standardization goal. ASISWG and ASISRG will work closely together to achieve their synergistic goals. The chair of ASISWG and ASISRG is Mr. Currie Colket. The project editors are Mr. Clyde Roby and Mr. Steve Blake.
SC22/WG9 unanimously voted to pursue the standardization of ASIS as a new work item at their meeting on 28 April 1995.
The ASIS standard will contain a compilable Ada specification. It will not contain an Ada body.