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From: Michael & Amy Hartsough <Hartsough@worldnet.att.net>
Subject: Mars Pathfinder (Was: Re: Death of DSP support?)
Date: 1997/09/03
Message-ID: <340E29A9.1B03@worldnet.att.net>#1/1
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References: <3402E91D.6D1A@top.monad.net> <dewar.872631281@merv>
 <1997Aug27.125655.1@eisner> <dewar.872721039@merv>
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Organization: AT&T WorldNet Services
Reply-To: Hartsough@worldnet.att.net
Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada
Date: 1997-09-03T00:00:00+00:00
List-Id: <comp.lang.ada>


Dale Pontius wrote:
> The reentry/landing software for Pathfinder was written in C. They
> interviewed the programmer on TV a while back. He spoke of the 140+
> explosive devices he had to set off at the correct times, that it
> was all written in C, and that he was sweating bullets the entire
> reentry that he might have made some trivial mistake.
> 
> Was Ada even a candidate there? Obviously there's little matter of
> maintenance on such "use once" software, though the need for correct
> behaviour is absolute in such cases. Perhaps more "rapid development"
> tools for Ada are called for, in order to give it a better chance in
> such markets.

This reminds me of something one of the Pathfinder managers
(Matt Golombek?) said during a press conference in the fist few days
after the landing. He was talking about some software problems
they had been having, and he stated that the "fix" was to "change
the priorities of some of the software tasks". This immediately
made me think, "The software's written in Ada?!?" The reason for
my surprise at the thought that it may have been coded in Ada
was because I once worked at JPL (circa 1989), but left because I
saw no commitment to Ada.

Actually, at the time, they were going to write one of the
spacecraft's flight software in Ada (Cassini?) but only because
that was the only compiler available for the selected microprocessor.

Does anyone know if ANY of the Pathfinder software was written in
Ada?

Later,
	Michael