frodo@b11.ingr.com (Chuck Puckett) (10/16/90)
We're looking at a Santa Clara, CA, company called PROCASE. They have a very intriguing product called SMARTsystem. It's an integrated development and maintenance (emphasis on maintenance) environment for C. The tool is primarily designed to allow a developer to "inherit" a large body of code and to quickly become familiar with that code, and to intelligently fix and enhance it. This is accomplished by providing a code navigation and comprehension capability, coupled with an integrated synyax & semantics check, a fairly sophisticated call graph, integrated debugger, and other features. The code navigation is perhaps the most powerful aspect of the system: it tends to eliminate "file" boundaries in a system. By providing (edittable) views of the system, the user may point and click (P&C) at a variable, then see only those lines (or statements) throughout the system where that variable (NOT string) is referenced, or perhaps where it's address is taken, etc. See where a function is invoked, defined, etc. P&C a variable, see where it is defined, P&C the struct name, then see where THAT struct is defined, P&C some struct within that struct, and see where IT's defined, etc, _ad infinitum_. Clearly, (or perhaps not so clearly: the transparency of my prose is a matter of dispute), I was nominally impressed with the presentation and on-hands experience I had. My question to comp.software-eng is the obvious one: Has anyone else heard of PROCASE, and if so, what have you heard, and what good, and what bad, and what are the war stories from any purchasers/user out there, etc, etc, etc... TIA. You can mail or post, machs nix to me. If there are takers, and they post, and there is sufficient interest, I'll post the results. (There ought to be a standard usenet acronym for the preceding paragraph. You know, like IMHO, we need the "Thanks In Advance, I'll Post The Results". Is that TIAIPTR?) Chuck "An acronym a day keeps comprehension away" Puckett