From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.4.5-pre1 (2020-06-20) on ip-172-31-74-118.ec2.internal X-Spam-Level: X-Spam-Status: No, score=-0.0 required=3.0 tests=BAYES_40 autolearn=ham autolearn_force=no version=3.4.5-pre1 Date: 11 Apr 93 04:00:59 GMT From: seas.gwu.edu!mfeldman@uunet.uu.net (Michael Feldman) Subject: Re: Ada Law Message-ID: <1993Apr11.040059.28434@seas.gwu.edu> List-Id: 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