Re: Army releases C language office accounting system

[tinton.ccur.com!cjh@princeton.edu (Christopher J. Henrich)]

In article <rlk.742592103@bonnie> rlk@bonnie.Rational.COM (Robert Kitzberger) w
rites:
>cjh@tinton.ccur.com (Christopher J. Henrich) writes:
>
>>One more time.
>>
>>The Ada Mandate does not apply to "business" systems.
>
>Is there something newer than Sec. 8092 of the 1991 Defense Appropriations
>Bill (see below) that excludes business systems?
>
>"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."

Apparently my understanding was out-of-date.  The original "Ada
Mandate" of the early 80's applied to embedded systems, and not
to office information systems.  (See the article by Col.
Whitaker in the proceedings of the History of Programming Languages
Conference (SIGPLAN Notices 3/93)).  

It seems to me that the law quoted above is evidence of a trend for
increasing use of Ada in the DoD.

BTW, Col. Whitaker states in his article that a large part of the
benefit of Ada (perhaps as much as half) would come from the use
of *one* language, instead of a Babel of compilable and assembly
languages.  This observation tends to take some of the steam out of
any C++/Ada language wars.  [What a party pooper I am. Don't I
realize that language wars are *FUN*!!??]

Regards,
Chris Henrich