From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.4.4 (2020-01-24) on polar.synack.me X-Spam-Level: X-Spam-Status: No, score=-1.9 required=5.0 tests=BAYES_00 autolearn=ham autolearn_force=no version=3.4.4 X-Google-Language: ENGLISH,ASCII-7-bit X-Google-Thread: 103376,efe03f20164a417b X-Google-Attributes: gid103376,public X-Google-ArrivalTime: 1995-03-20 02:24:24 PST Path: bga.com!news.sprintlink.net!cs.utexas.edu!math.ohio-state.edu!jussieu.fr!univ-lyon1.fr!swidir.switch.ch!epflnews!dinews.epfl.ch!lglsun!nebbe From: nebbe@lglsun.epfl.ch (Robb Nebbe) Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada Subject: Re: An observation of Ada (may offend) Date: 20 Mar 1995 09:31:29 GMT Organization: Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne Sender: nebbe@lglsun3.epfl.ch (Robb Nebbe) Distribution: world Message-ID: <1995Mar20.094745@lglsun.epfl.ch> References: <3k00no$8qv@agate.berkeley.edu> <3kcf82$ln3@felix.seas.gwu.edu> NNTP-Posting-Host: lglsun3.epfl.ch Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=iso-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit Date: 1995-03-20T09:31:29+00:00 List-Id: In article , 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