Re: Another Ada success story

[Steve Quinlan <steven.quinlan@nospam.lmco.com>]

Steve O'Neill wrote:

> Steve Quinlan wrote:
>
> >Next up (for us at Lockheed Martin Air Traffic Managment) will be our
> >first Ada 95 project. Based on a prototype written in C and PL/I by
> >MITRE,
>
> Why, pray tell, was the prototype done in this combination of languages?

I don't really know. MITRE did the prototype work and I'm not familiar with
the whole history of it. The prototype is a result of some research that has
been going on for many years. It's only now that the FAA has decided they
want to develop a productized version of this and deploy it.

I don't know the original platform that the prototype was developed for.
Right now, it runs on a DEC Alpha machine, but I don't think that's where it
started.  I think that what happened was that picked PL/I a long time ago,
and more recently they began trying to port it to C, but never completed the
port. Some of the display code (uses Motif) may have always been in C; I'm
not sure.

By the way, we won't be "porting" much of this code, with the exception of
some of the C code involved in controlling the displays. Our version of this
will run on a Sun SPARC machine rather than on a DEC. Display code will be
C, most everything else will be Ada 95.