CODEWITHSUNDEEP
adadocumentation-generation
Thoran
Thoran

Reputation: 173

Documentation tool for Ada software

Brief: I'm looking for some kind of tool to produce a software description from the comments in existing software source code.

In more detail: I've got existing source code written in Ada. Changes need to be made to this source code and I also need to generate a document containing a description of the software as a whole and all of its packages, routines etc. (if possible as PDF). For the existing routines these source code comments already exist and contain sufficient detail for my needs.

The description shall include at least

For projects based on C I'd do this using Doxygen. Doxygen itself, however, does not cope with sotware written in Ada. My thought was to (automatically) convert existing comments in the source code so that Doxygen can read these. The conversion itself was no problem (using Doxygen's filter mechanism), but as keywords and syntax between C and Ada differ a lot, this did not produce any useable output.

I then had a look at Understand from SciTools. While this analyses the software to a good detail and generates nice metrices, I was not able to get anything out of it, that resembles a document with what I need.

I want to avoid (manually) writing a separate document, but instead would like to generate this from the code base. I will have to put all the necessary information (perhaps with the the exception of a general overview) there anyhow, so why not use it for documentation purpose as well.

Is there any tool that is able to do what I need?

Upvotes: 1

Views: 1613

Answers (2)

malkev
malkev

Reputation: 121

For languages not supported by Doxygen, I've written my own "general purpose" filter. It's very basic, but useful for me. https://github.com/malkev/doxphp

Upvotes: 2

Jacob Sparre Andersen
Jacob Sparre Andersen

Reputation: 6611

There's a tool called "AdaDoc", which seems to do a part of what you're asking for. You can of course use "a2ps" for the textual part of your needs (I like that better than what AdaDoc generates).

There are several UML tools ("Umbrello" is one name I remember), which offer to create graphs of inter-package relations, but for a seriously sized project, the best option is to use the original design documents, and simply verify that the source text actually matches that design.

Upvotes: 3

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