Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!ingr!b11!frodo
From: frodo@b11.ingr.com (Chuck Puckett)
Newsgroups: comp.software-eng
Subject: PROCASE's SMART system: Heard of it?
Keywords: EndCase LowerCase IDE Maintenance
Message-ID: <9068@b11.ingr.com>
Date: 15 Oct 90 20:14:47 GMT
Organization: Intergraph Corp. Huntsville, AL
Lines: 34


We're looking at a Santa Clara, CA, company called PROCASE. They have a very 
intriguing product called SMARTsystem. It's an integrated development and
maintenance (emphasis on maintenance) environment for C. The tool is primarily
designed to allow a developer to "inherit" a large body of code and to
quickly become familiar with that code, and to intelligently fix and enhance
it. This is accomplished by providing a code navigation and comprehension
capability, coupled with an integrated synyax & semantics check, a fairly
sophisticated call graph, integrated debugger, and other features. The code
navigation is perhaps the most powerful aspect of the system: it tends to
eliminate "file" boundaries in a system. By providing (edittable) views of
the system, the user may point and click (P&C) at a variable, then see only
those lines (or statements) throughout the system where that variable (NOT
string) is referenced, or perhaps where it's address is taken, etc. See where
a function is invoked, defined, etc. P&C a variable, see where it is defined,
P&C the struct name, then see where THAT struct is defined, P&C some struct
within that struct, and see where IT's defined, etc, _ad infinitum_.

Clearly, (or perhaps not so clearly: the transparency of my prose is a matter
of dispute), I was nominally impressed with the presentation and on-hands
experience I had. My question to comp.software-eng is the obvious one: Has
anyone else heard of PROCASE, and if so, what have you heard, and what good,
and what bad, and what are the war stories from any purchasers/user out there,
etc, etc, etc...

TIA. You can mail or post, machs nix to me. If there are takers, and they
post, and there is sufficient interest, I'll post the results. (There ought
to be a standard usenet acronym for the preceding paragraph. You know, like
IMHO, we need the "Thanks In Advance, I'll Post The Results". Is that
TIAIPTR?)

Chuck "An acronym a day keeps comprehension away" Puckett