Re: How widespread is Ada now?

[dave@sun.soe (Dave Goldblatt)]

From article <917@naucse.UUCP>, by sbw@naucse.UUCP (Steve Wampler):

> 1. The DoD is now turning down bids by companies solely
>    because they are not specifying Ada as the programming
>    language.  (The particular example used was one
>    involving a bid by a division of Honeywell.)

This is true.  For almost all _new_ DoD contracts (with VERY limited
exceptions), all software must be written in Ada using a DoD-approved
Ada compiler.  For the company I worked for this past summer, we had
to convert all of our Pascal source to Ada.  'Course, since Ada doesn't
support Curses internally, we had to use the good ol' PRAGMA directive
a few times.. :-)

Actually, one thought was to write everything in C, and have the Ada
program call the C code.  Unfortunately, I don't think DoD would be
too appreciative.

> 2. NASA, DoD, NBS (National Bureau of Standards) are all
>    requiring Ada now (along with several other government
>    agencies that I didn't take note of).

From what I understand, NASA "encourages" software to be written in
Ada, but it is NOT required.  Reason: Most Ada compilers simply produce
code which is too big and/or too slow.  Example: On 3 different Unix
compilers, a "Hello, world" program produced code ranging in size of
89.9K to 107K.  (not meant as a scientific example, so no flames please! :-)

> 3. There is, right now, a 600,000 Ada programmer shortage.
>    (I think this is the one that is I find most surprising.)

I don't know if it's THAT large, but in my experience, there is most
certainly a shortage.  In fact, is you have "Ada" listed on your resume,
you have very good odds of getting a job with a defense contractor..

> 4. Universities that adopt an Ada-based computer science
>    program are pretty much assured of obtaining several
>    million dollars of grant support to do so, and that
>    this has happened to every (most? many? some?) program
>    that has done so.

This I haven't heard.  Then again, I can't think of any Ada-based computer
science programs off the top of my head either.

As an interesting note: a relative of mine went to a seminar given by one
of the members of the Ada design committee.  He opened with this:
"Ada was designed to be used for embedded systems software.  Of course,
you _can't_ use it for that, but..." :-)

Flames to /dev/null -- I actually started getting used to the language! :-)
(did anyone know that GNU Emacs has an Ada mode?)

-dg-
-- 

Internet: dave@sun.soe.clarkson.edu    or:   dave@clutx.clarkson.edu
BITNET:   dave@CLUTX.Bitnet            uucp: {rpics, gould}!clutx!dave
Matrix:   Dave Goldblatt @ 1:260/360   ICBM: Why do you want to know? :-)