Future work

As usual, there is more work to be done than time to do it in. Workers or test pilots are invited to apply for the following tasks which may get down in the fullness of time minister. I'm particularly interested in which projects people think are worthwhile (or rubbish).

1. Ada support - pre 1.00 versions of nana provided support for Ada. Adding a full version of nana into the GNATS compiler would probably be useful, particularly the real time part.
2. FORTRAN support.
3. Message browsing (`emacs/fess.el') - a very prototypical mode for browsing message logs is distributed with nana. Features include hiding/showing lines by regular expression or predicate. If someone who knows what they are doing rewrites this that would be a good thing. Or perhaps a modified version of `less' would be useful.
4. Program Visualisation (`tcl/status.c') - another prototype which uses a small TCL/TK library and nana logging to generate some nice pictures showing the behaviour of the program. For example the history of variables over time can be recorded, graphs drawn and long message logs kept. A new version of this has been created and may be released shortly.
5. Eiffel shortform program - the shortform of an Eiffel program contains the function signatures (arguments, etc) together with the assertions (pre/post conditions). An extension could perhaps be put in a program such as `DOC++' or `cxref' which extracts the nana assertions.
6. Automated Testing - combine nana logs with a workbench that lets you verify properties of the logs using programs `gawk' or the `PRECC' (LL infinity version of YACC). This technique has been used on industrial strength products quite successfully.
7. GNU standards - perhaps it would be worthwhile to set up a prototype for checking and logging in GNU tools.
8. Extend GDB(1) so that we can support `Q.h' style quantifiers in `DI.h' expressions. Basically we need to add a restricted form of the statement value expression to GDB.
9. Support for other (particularly ANSI only) compilers.

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