Re: Legislative Mandate for Ada

[mfeldman@seas.gwu.edu (Michael Feldman)]

In article <2577@cod.NOSC.MIL> sampson@cod.nosc.mil.UUCP (Charles H. Sampson) writes:
>
>     I think they meant to say that all DoD software must be written in Ada
>unless it is not cost-effective; if it is claimed to not be cost-effective,
>that claim must be confirmed by a special exemption from SecDef.
That sounds like a reasonable interpretation to me.

>     To borrow Norm Cohen's question from another context, who writes these
>things?  (Probable answer here: people who love run-on sentences.)
Well, it probably was a Capitol Hill staff person, or else it was fed to
such a person by someone in the Ada community. The explanatory paragraph
looks like it came from the pen (word-processor?) of one of our Ada
evangelists; it seems to be too literate about Ada to have been written
by a run-of-the-mill Hill staffer.

Reminds me of the 1987 (I think) AdaExpo in West Virginia, where the
keynote speaker was Senator Robert Byrd. Some turkey wrote a speech for him
that put all kinds of technical jargon in his mouth. It was both very
funny and very sad to hear poor ol' Byrd trying to be smooth and articulate
about generics, tasking, and operator overloading.

As it happens, I know a bit about how this stuff gets written because my wife
does exactly this kind of legislative drafting for the Dept. of Education
(no flames please - she doesn't make policy). She is a very fussy and
careful writer, and is always aghast at the rotten quality of much of the
writing she sees around town. Especially disconcerting is the poor use of
English in our laws. How can we (dis)obey what we can't understand?

Thank you for not chopping off the head of the messenger because the message
was poorly written :-)

Mike Feldman