Product category:
Design and Development Software
News Release from: AdaCore | Subject: Gnatcheck
Edited by the Electronicstalk Editorial
Team on 31 January 2008
Code verification tool provides safety
boost
Gnatcheck facilitates the demonstration of a system's compliance with DO-178B, a standard that defines the guidelines for development of aviation software in both the US and Europe
AdaCore has released the Gnatcheck, an integrated coding standard verification tool within the Gnat Pro development environment Gnatcheck meets the growing need for automated verification in safety-critical avionics systems, particularly those systems that need to satisfy the DO-178B standard
This article was originally published on Electronicstalk on 12 Jan 2006 at 8.00am (UK)
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The Gnat Programming Studio is a sophisticated software development environment for the Ada programming language.
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The latest and most advanced version of the Gnat Pro open-source Ada development environment supports all the major new features in Ada 2005.
Developed by RTCA and EUROCAE, DO-178B defines the guidelines for development of aviation software in both the US and Europe and is being increasingly adopted by other related sectors, such as air traffic control and military applications.
AdaCore's Gnatcheck is an extensible rule-based tool with an easy to use interface.
It allows developers to completely define a coding standard (referred to as a "Software Code Standard" in DO-178B) as a set of rules, for example a subset of permitted language features.
Further reading
Environment accelerated Ada programming
Gnat Programming Studio is an advanced, powerful integrated development environment that accompanies the Gnat Pro Ada language development toolset.
IDE supports remote programming
AdaCore has launched its remote programming solution, an advanced feature of the company's Gnat Programming Studio (GPS) 4.0 integrated development environment (IDE).
It verifies a program's conformance with the resulting rules and thereby facilitates demonstration of a system's compliance with DO-178B.
"The combination of the Ada language (an international standard), Gnatcheck and additional constraints and reporting inside Gnat Pro, provides a comprehensive solution for avionics developers", said Robert Dewar, President and CEO of AdaCore.
"Ada has already been used in many safety-critical systems, such as the Boeing 787 and C-130 AMP, Airbus A380 and Eurofighter among others".
"With software innovation powering today's successful aircraft, automatic coding standard verification is becoming more and more important", said Cyrille Comar, Managing Director, AdaCore Europe.
"The highly structured nature of the Ada language makes it a natural choice for avionics development and by adding our own enhancements within Gnat Pro we can offer the most complete and integrated solution for coding standard verification compliant with DO-178B requirements".
The system includes an integrated Ada Restrictions mechanism for banning specific features from an application.
This can be used to restrict features, such as tasking, exceptions, dynamic allocation, fixed or floating point, input/output and unchecked conversions.
Gnat Pro specific restrictions complement Ada's set of restrictions, such as those banning the generation of implicit loops or conditionals in the object code, or the generation of elaboration code.
Gnatcheck's status as a qualified tool will allow the evidence that it generates to be used as part of a system's certification.
Gnatcheck is currently available as part of the Gnat Pro subscription.
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