A logic database to support configuration management in ADA

The Programming Language Ada (Ada 1983), direct1y faces aspects related to software production by introducing concepts like program library, modules and separate compilation issues. Modules management or, using a wider term, configuration, is intended as the activity of binding together different components into a system thus bringing, in the programming language, elements of programming in the large. In Ada, modules are composed through with clauses that are simply interpreted as dependency relations among modules, with respect to compilation, recompilation and linking activities. We propose a logic framework which permits both, to formalize such configurational activity (thus extending the benefits of a formal definition to the language supporting environment) and to introduce, in the programming environment, a very flexible tool to reason about modules properties and configuration strategies. We have to cope with an evolving world where the effects of activities, such as compilation and linking, are the creation and modification of relations among objects. This brings us to consider a database approach and, particular, a Logic Database (LDB) one, to handle creation of new relations and objects.