Gnu Emacs Emacs ada-mode homepage

Files

ada-mode-4.01.tar.gz
My latest version.
ada-mode-examples-4.01.tar.gz
Ada examples from the current Ada mode manual.
ada-mode.html
The current Ada mode manual. The distribution contains this and an Emacs info version.
ada-mode-patches.el
My current patches to Ada mode; open for discussion about including in Emacs distribution.
ada-mode-keys.el
My bindings, settings, and hooks for using Ada mode; provided as an example.
gnat-fix-error.el
Utilities for automatically fixing errors reported by the gnat compiler; proposed addition to Ada mode.

Ada mode 5.0 (rewrite, new indentation engine)

I'm working on two new indentation/navigation engines; one based on SMIE, the other on wisi. At the same time, I'm rewriting all of Ada mode, to make everything more structured, and take full advantage of the new indentation/navigation engines. Similarly for gpr mode.

SMIE uses an operator precendence parser. That is useful because it can be run backwards, so we can find the statement start from any point in the statement, using only local parsing. On the other hand, it requires writing lots of language-specific code to refine the Ada keywords into SMIE keywords that are unique. In effect, a lot of the knowlege of the language grammar is embedded in the refining code.

The ada-smie indentation and navigation engine is working better than ada-mode 4.0, so I'm declaring it ready for release. However, there are still some indentation and navigation bugs (to be fixed in ada-wisi), and there is still work to do on other parts of ada-mode.

Wisi uses a generalized LALR(1) parser, which requires parsing from the start of the text. On the other hand, it allows embedding much more information in the grammar, by specifying indentation information to cache at each found keyword in the grammar actions. The only code to write is then the indentation rules that use that cached information; much simpler code than in the SMIE case. That will make it easier to maintain in the future.

On the gripping hand, LALR grammars are finicky to write. In particular, the Ada grammar presented in ARM Annex P is not LALR(1); when compiled by the wisent grammar compiler, it reports many shift/reduce and reduce/reduce conflicts. Some of the conflicts can be eliminated by simple rewriting, but some cannot. So I've written a generalized LALR(1) parser; it resolves the conflicts at parse time by spawning another parser, and following both of the paths in the confict, until one encounters an error. I also extended the OpenToken grammar compiler to represent the conflict in the parser table , and output a suitable Elisp source file. As a side benefit, OpenToken can now generate Ada code (as well as Elisp code) from Bison style input format. I also fixed two subtle bugs in OpenToken (that each took me a month to find).

An important issue that I have not fully explored for the LALR parser yet is how it will behave when it encounters invalid syntax, which will occur while writing code. So far, the SMIE parser is quite tolerant of invalid syntax, although it did require adding some error handling code. I've also added some simple error handling code to the generalized LALR parser, and it handles some of the tests.

I've implemented gpr-wisi, an indentation/navigation engine for gpr-mode. The gpr grammar is far simpler than the Ada grammar, so it does not have any conflict problems. The rest of gpr-mode is very simple, so it is ready for release.

I've made a good start on ada-wisi, which will replace ada-smie (it already indents conditional expressions better). It passes several of the Ada indentation tests.

Things to do

Significant things left to implement, in priority order. notes.text in the source code has more detailed info on these.

Releases

These are just zipped source files posted here when I feel like I've reached a significant milestone. The ada-france monotone repository has up-to-date code.

Unless otherwise noted, tested on:

See below for installation instructions for GNAT GPL 2012 on Debian.

org.emacs.ada-mode.smie-2013-05-21.tar.gz org.opentoken.stephe-4.0w-2013-05-21.tar.bz2
Fixed several bugs in OpenToken related to handling empty productions. All OpenToken test pass with GNAT 7.1.1, GNAT GPL 2012.
org.emacs.ada-mode.smie-2013-04-16.tar.gz
Fixed a major bug in the wisi generalized parser; the pending actions list was built in reverse order, and had the wrong structure for apply.
org.emacs.ada-mode.smie-2013-04-06.tar.gz
org.opentoken.stephe-4.0w-2013-04-06.tar.bz2
Added workarounds in OpenToken for GNAT GPL 2012, fixed build process for Debian testing. many OpenToken tests fail with GNAT GPL 2012, but wisi-generate works, which is enough for Emacs Ada mode.
org.emacs.ada-mode.smie-2013-03-27.tar.gz
org.opentoken.stephe-4.0w-2013-03-27.tar.bz2
ada-wisi is now using the wisi parser, and passes more tests. OpenToken is used as the grammar compiler; it can now read a Bison style input file, and generate Elisp source code. Other stuff:
org.emacs.ada-mode.smie-2013-01-30.tar.gz
gpr-mode is finished, using the wisent parser. ada-wisi started, handles ada_mode-generic_package.ads, some other test code. Got far enough to know it will definitely be easier to maintain than ada-smie. Other stuff:
org.emacs.ada-mode.smie-2013-01-03.tar.gz
Started working on gpr-mode, using the wisent parser. There's nothing in org.emacs.ada-mode yet, just stuff in org.opentoken.stephe. I'm using Ada mode 5.0 to write the Ada code to read a Bison input file and output OpenToken source code that then outputs elisp for the parser tables. In the process, found and fixed many Ada mode 5.0 bugs/missing features:
org.emacs.ada-mode.smie-2012-12-08.tar.gz
Implemented project files, ada-goto-declaration, automatic casing, format parameter list. New option ada-indent-comment-col-0. Handle uppercase keywords. Fixed several bugs.

I've started using this for editing real Ada code. It's useable, but there is a lot missing. Top on list is automatically fixing compiler errors; it's amazing how much I miss that :).

org.emacs.ada-mode.smie-2012-11-12.tar.gz
Tested against my GDS code, fixed all bugs found by that. See test/test-indent-5.0.sh to run an indentation test on your code. For example, I run this as: 
cd /Projects/org.emacs.ada-mode.smie/test
rm /tmp/gds_indent/*
./test-indent-5.0.sh $GDS_ROOT/main_lynx_5/common/spacewire /tmp/gds_indent
And then review the results with the Emacs command 
(dired "/tmp/gds_indent/*.diff")
I found that a lot of my code did not follow Ada mode 4.01 indentation. In addition, I found several more bugs in Ada mode 4.01, that are fixed in Ada mode 5.0. So Ada mode 5.0 is not strictly backward-compatible with Ada mode 4.01 for indentation, but it is mostly compatible.
org.emacs.ada-mode.smie-2012-10-20.tar.gz
Another significant clean up. Block and loop labels respect ada-indent-label, comments meet ada-mode 4.01, cache bugs fixed.
org.emacs.ada-mode.smie-2012-10-03.tar.gz
Significant clean up. Block statements, if statements now working.
org.emacs.ada-mode.smie-2012-09-29.tar.gz
I've made a lot of progress in learning how SMIE works, and how best to use it for Ada code. I've got a design that I believe is stable; lately I've been tweaking and adding new syntax, rather than redesigning every time I add something. Several of the indentation test files pass!

So if other people are willing to help, now would be a good time to start reading the code, and adding the missing features.

org.emacs.ada-mode.smie-2012-09-16.tar.gz
I've played with Emacs SMIE (Simple Minded Indentation Engine, ((info "(elisp)SMIE Grammar"), SMIE chapter in elisp manual)) for a few days, and it looks very promising.

I've stripped out most of the extended features of ada-mode, and implemented a small subset of the final parser. I'm working my way thru the indentation tests I have for ada-mode 4.01; so far the first subtest almost passes (a protected type declaration, in test/ada-mode.adb) :).

Install GNAT GPL 2012 on Debian

  1. Download GNAT GPL 2012 (gnat-gpl-2012-i686-gnu-linux-libc2.3-bin.tar.gz) from AdaCore GNAT Libre.
  2. cd ~
  3. tar zxf gnat-gpl-2012-i686-gnu-linux-libc2.3-bin.tar.gz
  4. cd gnat-2012-i686-gnu-linux-libc2.3-bin
  5. ./doinstall

    I recommend installing to /opt/gnat/gpl-2012/.

  6. In ~/.bash_profile or similar, add: 
        export LIBRARY_PATH=/usr/lib/i386-linux-gnu/

ada-france access

There are several branches:

org.emacs.ada-mode.smie
Ada mode 5.0, with smie and wisi indentation engines for Ada, and a wisi indentation engine for gpr.
org.opentoken.stephe
OpenToken extended to produce Elisp source for generalized LALR(1) parser, used by wisi indentation engine.
org.emacs.dvc
Emacs DVC, a front end to several distributed control systems, including monotone. See my introduction to monotone with DVC

You can access ada-france read-only, or read-write. These commands work with mtn 0.48 .. 1.0; you can use the equivalent URL in 1.0:

anonymous (read only) access
mtn --db ~/monotone-dbs/ada-france.db db init
mtn --db ~/monotone-dbs/ada-france.db --key '' pull www.ada-france.org "org.emacs.*"
read/write access requires a public key
If you are using DVC:
mtn --db ~/monotone-dbs/ada-france.db automate sync --ticker=count "mtn://www.ada-france.org?org.emacs.*" >> ~/.dvc/sync.basic_io

mailing list, bugs

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Please report bugs both here and to the Emacs bug list. Put Package: emacs, ada-mode as the first line of the bug message.

my home page Author : Stephen Leake Valid HTML 4.01! Created with Emacs Last modified: Sun Feb 17 07:02:04 EST 2013