Contractors and agencies using Ada

[beth@umcp-cs.UUCP ( Beth Katz)]

Matthew P Wiener/UCB Math Dept/Berkeley CA 94720
ucbvax!brahms!weemba    writes:
> You may be interested that many of the largest defense companies/
> contractors consider Ada to be a complete joke and have no intention
> of making it available unless their programmers start screaming and
> begging for it.  This includes Los Alamos National Labs, Lawrence
> Livermore Labs, the National Security Agency, NASA and Lockheed. 
> Considering that all the biggies run UNIX on Cray-2s and are--if
> they are intelligent--moving towards workstations that will talk
> with the Cray-2s quite easily (read UNIX workstations), it looks
> like that a large portion of DoD programming will move towards C,
> not Ada.

To set the record straight (and followup on Macrakis's comments),
NASA has decided to use Ada for Space Station.  At NASA's Goddard
Space Flight Center, one flight dynamics simulator is being developed
by two teams to examine the feasibility of using Ada.  One team
is using Ada while the other is using the more traditional FORTRAN. 
Detailed data (collected as part of the Software Engineering Laboratory)
will be examined from both practical and research perspectives to
help NASA make a decision about using Ada.  Ada is being used as
the only development language on at least one other project at Goddard. 
I'm fairly sure that other NASA sites are also considering using Ada. 
NASA hasn't dismissed it out-of-hand and certainly doesn't consider
it a joke.

As far as UNIX workstations and Ada being mutually exclusive (it
seems to me that Wiener's statement implies that), Verdix has a
compiler running under UNIX on Sun workstations.  NASA Goddard
is using DEC's VMS/Ada on their Vaxen.  Not everybody uses Crays.

No comment from me on the other 'biggies' mentioned above.  I
hesitate to lump everyone together.

			Elizabeth Katz
			Dept. of CS - Univ. of Maryland
Arpanet:  beth@mimsy.umd.edu
CSnet:    beth@umcp-cs
Usenet:   ...!seismo!umcp-cs!beth
*** I'm one of the monitors for the Goddard dual development,  ***
*** and I've been using the Verdix compiler on our Vaxen which ***
*** run UNIX.  All opinions mentioned above are my own.        ***