Re: An observation of Ada (may offend)

[nebbe@lglsun.epfl.ch (Robb Nebbe)]

In article <fjm.63.000D29AE@ti.com>, fjm@ti.com (Fred J. McCall) writes:
|> 
|> I'm curious; how many of the things on the list are not government related or 
|> regulated?  Is it significantly easier, for example, to get the government to 
|> sign off on aircraft software in part because it happens to be written in Ada 
|> (irrespective of the actual implementation or of the merits of the language)?  
|> That and the few banking applications would seem to me to be the only ones on 
|> your list not run by governments.
|> 
|> Non-myth -- virtually all Ada software is produced for government agencies?

I would guess that a lot of the projects listed are very large and involve
large groups of developers. Many have real-time constraints, are distributed
and involve concurrency. They are not all saftey-critical but many require
a very high level of reliability.

Now, where is the correlation? Governments seem to be naturally involved
in almost all large safety-critical projects. Furthermore it isn't clear
how much government involvement affects the choice of a language. In
the US the government seems to be keen on saying "use Ada" but I don't
think that is always the case outside of the US.

Here in Switzerland they are replacing the signaling software in many
of the train stations (this is more of a station by station approach based
on necessity rather than anything big like replacing all the signaling
software in all the stations). My understanding is that Swiss Federal
Railway doesn't give a hoot in which language the software is written. The
software is in Ada but the choice of a language had nothing to do with
government involvement. Interestingly enough the parent company of the
company doing the project had applied some presure to use C rather than
Ada but this was rejected as being technically unfounded.

Robb Nebbe