Why Use ASIS to get Information from the Ada Environment?
Tools needing syntactic and semantic information would otherwise have to recompute the information from all the source code (which could take a long time and require the semantic analysis of a compiler), fake the information (dangerous when reliable information is needed), or access the information through proprietary interfaces to an implementor’s Ada environment (non-portable and breaks when proprietary interfaces change as they frequently do from one release to the next). ASIS provides a highly portable, easy-to-use interface, insulating users from changes in proprietary representations.
