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Date: 28 May 93 01:30:05 GMT
From: seas.gwu.edu!mfeldman@uunet.uu.net  (Michael Feldman)
Subject: Re: TOOLS USA Final program
Message-ID: <1993May28.013005.8296@seas.gwu.edu>
List-Id: <comp.lang.ada>

In article <1993May27.113755.1@sep.vitro.com> jpecore@vitro.com (Joseph Pecore)
 writes:
>In article <1993May27.010659.11376@seas.gwu.edu>, mfeldman@seas.gwu.edu (Micha
el Feldman) writes:
>> In article <C7nt5M.7Jx@ra.nrl.navy.mil> ege@cmsun.cmf.nrl.navy.mil (Raimund 
Ege) writes:
>>>This is the final program for TOOLS USA 93 (Technology of Object-Oriented
>>>Languages and Systems), to be held in Santa Barbara (California),
>>>August 2-6, 1993.
>>>
>> [program stuff deleted]
>>>
>>>7. EXHIBITION
>>>-------------
>>>The current list of exhibitors includes:
>>>
>>>    * Mark V Sytems Ltd.
>>>    * Object Technologies, Inc.
>>>    * Smartstar Corporation
>>>    * CGI
>>>    * Easel Corporation
>>>    * Unir Technology, Inc.
>>>    * Sequiter Software Inc.
>>>    * Interactive Software Engineering
>>>    * Tower Technology
>>>    * Dyad Software Corporation
>>>    * NICE
>>>    * Prentice Hall
>>>    * Software Magazine
>>>
>> Lemme get the jump on Greg here.
>> 
>> Sigh...where are the Ada tool companies?
>> 
>
>Mark V System's ObjectMaker supports many Ada design notations (Booch, 
>Buhr, etc) and I know it has Ada code generation capabilites from the Buhr 
>diagrams.
>
Ah, OK, the news is better than I thought. I stand corrected.
Anybody going to this conferebce? Please let us know whether Mark V
_admits_ it does Ada.

Anybody see IDE (Software Through Pictures) ads recently? They like these
full-pagers in IEEE Software, etc. Nowhere in their ads do they admit they
have an Ada backend to their tool.

I had the misfortune to meet with some DoD types a while ago; there was
a C++ guy who discussed some C++ possibilities with these manager types;
I was invited to give the Ada "side". The C++ guy gushed about the power
of Software Through PIctures to generate C++. I asked whether he or anyone
else in the room was aware of the fact that IDE makes a pretty decent _Ada_
backend. "Uhhh....no, I wasn't aware of it," was the response. 

An IDE principal told me the following week that he didn't think he needed 
to advertise the Ada stuff he makes, because he sells mostly to project
managers in DoD who "know all about what we do." I told him my experience;
his answer was, more-or-less, "oops..., looks like we blew it"

The DoD types were about to commit to a design and language for a C3 system, 
more-or-less in that order, but they were VERY concerned about the language.
They were basically trying to figure out how much trouble it would be to
get a waiver or otherwise circumvent the Mandate. They didn't have a clue
to their design yet, though, except that they'd been told that OO was a
Good Thing.

Oh - they asked me whether it was true that Ada did not support data 
abstraction and information hiding. And they'll very soon be buying one of
tomorrow's C3 systems. We're in deep doo-doo, sports fans.

Mike Feldman