Re: Ada Law

[seas.gwu.edu!mfeldman@uunet.uu.net (Michael Feldman)]

In article <12867247991.21.HVERNE@WSMR-SIMTEL20.ARMY.MIL> HVERNE@WSMR-SIMTEL20.
ARMY.MIL ("Howard E. Verne") writes:
>Where can I obtain a copy of the "Ada Law" passed by congress????
>HVER
>-------

Following is the original 1990 version. The 91 and 92 versions repeated
the same language without the explanatory hype.

Mike Feldman
(see mandate below sig)
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Michael B. Feldman
co-chair, SIGAda Education Committee

Professor, Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
School of Engineering and Applied Science
The George Washington University
Washington, DC 20052 USA
(202) 994-5253 (voice)
(202) 994-5296 (fax)
mfeldman@seas.gwu.edu (Internet)

"The most important thing is to be sincere, 
and once you've learned how to fake that, you've got it made." 
-- old show-business adage
------------------------------------------------------------------------

I recently received a copy of the section of the Defense Appropriation
Conference Report regarding Ada, and thought you might be interested in
reading what Congress has to say. For you outside-the-Beltway folks,
a conference report is the congressional document that reconciles any
differences between House-passed and Senate-passed bills. Both houses vote 
on the conference report, and basically that's how the law is passed.
In this case, congress passed this DoD appropriation bill at the end
of October, and Bush signed it. Here is the relevant paragraph:

"Sec. 8092. Notwithstanding any other provision of law, after June 1, 1991,
 where cost-effective, all Department of Defense software shall be written
 in the programming language Ada, in the absence of a special exemption
 by an official designated by the Secretary of Defense."

In plain English: no gobbledegook about "embedded systems" or "mission-
critical systems." The criterion is cost-effectiveness. Might be fun to
chat on the net about how big a loophole "cost-effectiveness" is, or
how it might be determined.

As background, here is a lengthy paragraph from the explanatory language
that came along with the conference report.

"Ada Programming Language - The Department of Defense developed Ada to
reduce the cost of development and support of software systems written in
the hundreds of languages used by the DoD through the early 1980's.
Beside the training economies of scale arising from a common language,
Ada enables software cost reduction in several other ways: (1) its
constructs have been chosen to be building blocks for disciplined
software engineering; (2) its internal checking inhibits errors in
large systems lying beyond the feasibility of manual checking; and
(3) its separation of software module interfaces from their
implementations facilitates and encourages reuse of already-built
and tested program parts. While each of these advantages is important,
Ada's encouragement of software engineering is fundamental. Software
practitioners increasingly believe the application of engineering
disciplines is the only currently-feasible avenue toward controlling
unbridled software cost escalation in ever-larger and more complex systems.
In march, 1987, the Deputy Secretary of Defense mandated use of Ada in
DoD weapons systems and strongly recommended it for other DoD
applications. This mandate has stimulated the development of commercially-
available Ada compilers and support tools that are fully responsive to 
almost all DoD requirements. However, there are still too many other
languages being used in the DoD, and thus the cost benefits of Ada are
being substantially delayed. Therefore, the Committee [congressional
conference committee - MBF] has included a new general provision,
Section 8084 [changed later to 8092 - MBF] that enforces the DoD
policy to make Ada mandatory. It will remove any doubt of full DoD
transition to Ada, particularly in other than weapons systems
applications. It will stimulate DoD to move forward quickly with 
Ada-based software engineering education and cataloguing/reuse systems.
In addition, U.S. [government] and commercial users have already
expanded tremendously the use of Ada and Ada-related technology.
The DoD, by extending its Ada mandate, can leverage off these commercial
advantages. Navy Ada is considered to be the same as Ada for the purposes
of this legislation [HUH? What's Navy Ada? Anyone know?], and the term
Ada is otherwise defined by ANSI/MIL-STD-1815. The Committee envisions
that the Office of the Secretary of Defense will administer the general
provision in a manner that prevents disruption to weapon systems that
are well into development. The Committee directs that applications
using or currently planning to use the Enhanced Modular Signal Processor
(EMSP) be exempted from mandatory use of Ada as a matter of policy."

This is what is known as "legislative history." It is not formally
part of the law but gives insight into the mindset of the lawmakers
(or their staff people, really). Have fun with it.

Mike Feldman