MALPAS and the Static Analysis of Avionics Software

MALPAS, the powerful software static analysis tool supported by Rex Thompson & Partners Ltd, is about to acquire facilities for the automatic handling of software written in Ada and C — both highly important computer languages in the aerospace field. MALPAS's analysers examine software for structural integrity, errors in output and compliance with the specification, and are major weapons in the drive for both software correctness and cost effectiveness (the earlier that errors can be discovered and eliminated the cheaper it is). To enable MALPAS to handle large amounts of code, an automatic translator is required to translate the software code under analysis into MALPAS's working language, IL (Intermediate Language). To date, MALPAS possesses translators for Pascal, CORAL 66, and 8086 assembler and the lack of Ada and C translators has limited its usefulness in the many large‐scale aerospace projects beginning t be coded up in these languages. This will change with the release of both translators this summer.