A comment on "operator identification in ADA" by Ganzinger and Ripken

ABSTRACT

In a recent technical contribution [1], H. Ganzinger and K. Ripken investigate the impacts of the ADA overloading rule for the problem of operator identification; they show that operator identification may be achieved by at most four passes over the expression trees. While this theoretical result is correct, the procedure suggested for traversing the expression trees is insufficient in several ways. A correct version of the algorithm obviously intended by the authors is given below. Thereby the same notation as in [1] is used; in particular, T(v) stands for the type set and O(v) for the operator set associated with a node v in the expression tree.

REFERENCES

• 1: Harald Ganzinger , Knut Ripken, Operator identification in ADA: formal specification, complexity, and concrete implementation, ACM SIGPLAN Notices, v.15 n.2, p.30-42, February 1980 [doi>10.1145/947586.947589]
• 2: J. D. Ichbiah, Preliminary Ada reference manual, ACM SIGPLAN Notices, v.14 n.6a, p.1-145, June 1979 [doi>10.1145/956650.956651]