Re: Typing Ada

[munck@MITRE-BEDFORD.ARPA (Bob Munck)]

> the Interactive Ada Workstation, funded by the Air Force, includes a
> Buhr diagram editor which allows the user to draw top-level Buhr
> diagrams and have these diagrams compiled into Ada package and task
> specifications.

About four years ago I started an IR&D project to do something similar
with SADT diagrams.  MITRE decided that the Air Force wasn't interested
in things of this nature (SADT or Ada) and didn't renew the funding
after the first year.  (FYI, SADT diagrams are now an important tool in
SDI work.)

Though all I accomplished was a good PC-based tool for drawing the
diagrams, I am convinced that this is the direction that "guts-level
coding" has to take, be it Buhr, SADT, or whatever.  People can "read"
pictures better than words in a row; machines, until recently, couldn't
do anything at all with pictures and could handle only very simple
sequences of words (programming languages).  I think it likely that Ada
will be the LAST major one-dimensional programming language.

When the pictures get to the point of being adequate for stating
completely the operation of a system, we won't need the Ada anymore.  It
will become the equivalent of object code.

                              -- Bob Munck, MITRE