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10 Future work
**************

As usual, there is more work to be done than time to do it in.  Workers
or test pilots are invited to apply for the following tasks which may
get down in the fullness of time minister.  I'm particularly interested
in which projects people think are worthwhile (or rubbish).

  1. Ada support - pre 1.00 versions of nana provided support for Ada.
     Adding a full version of nana into the GNATS compiler would
     probably be useful, particularly the real time part.
  2. FORTRAN support.
  3. Message browsing ('emacs/fess.el') - a very prototypical mode for
     browsing message logs is distributed with nana.  Features include
     hiding/showing lines by regular expression or predicate.  If
     someone who knows what they are doing rewrites this that would be a
     good thing.  Or perhaps a modified version of 'less' would be
     useful.
  4. Program Visualisation ('tcl/status.c') - another prototype which
     uses a small TCL/TK library and nana logging to generate some nice
     pictures showing the behaviour of the program.  For example the
     history of variables over time can be recorded, graphs drawn and
     long message logs kept.  A new version of this has been created and
     may be released shortly.
  5. Automated Testing - combine nana logs with a workbench that lets
     you verify properties of the logs using programs 'gawk' or the
     'PRECC' (LL infinity version of YACC). This technique has been used
     on industrial strength products quite successfully.
  6. GNU standards - perhaps it would be worthwhile to set up a
     prototype for checking and logging in GNU tools.
  7. Extend GDB(1) so that we can support 'Q.h' style quantifiers in
     'DI.h' expressions.  Basically we need to add a restricted form of
     the statement value expression to GDB.
  8. Support for other (particularly ANSI only) compilers.

