Ada Conformity Assessment Test Suite

The Ada Conformity Assessment Test Suite (ACATS) is the test suite used for Ada processor conformity testing.

The preface to the test report includes the following:

:Conformity assessment does not ensure that a processor has no nonconformities to the Ada standard other than those, if any, documented in this report. The compiler vendor declares that the tested processor contains no deliberate deviation from the Ada standard; a copy of this Declaration of Conformity is presented immediately after the certificate.

The second paragraph of the background of the current [http://www.adaic.com/compilers/procs/3.0/ACAP30.html ACAA procedures] says:

:It is important to note the scope and intent of conformity assessment. The purpose of conformity assessment is to ensure that Ada processors achieve a high degree of conformity with the Ada standard (Ada95 as corrected by [TC1] ). Characteristics such as performance and suitability for a particular application are not specified by the standard, and thus are outside the scope of Ada conformity assessment. Moreover, the ACATS is a set of test programs intended to check broadly for correct implementation; it is not possible to exhaustively test for conformity. Thus, conformity is checked only to the extent of these tests; processors that are certified as conforming may fail to conform to the standard in ways peculiar to each, under particular circumstances.

The ACATS consists of 1821 tests with 255,838 lines of code occupying 30 MB of storage. The test suite is publicly available and for example part of the sources to the GNU Compiler Collection, which also contains an Ada compiler.

References

* "ISO/IEC 18009: Information technology — Programming languages — Ada: Conformity assessment of a language processor (ACATS)"

See also

* Ada programming language
* Conformity assessment
* Standards

External links

* http://www.ada-auth.org/acats.html