Re: Legislative Mandate for Ada

[g_harrison@vger.nsu.edu]

In article <2585@cod.NOSC.MIL>, sampson@cod.NOSC.MIL (Charles H. Sampson) writes:
> In article <2455@sparko.gwu.edu> mfeldman@seas.gwu.edu () writes:
>>In article <9700@as0c.sei.cmu.edu> bwb@sei.cmu.edu (Bruce Benson) writes:
>>>
>>>If the percentage doesn't approach 100 fast enough then they will mandate
>>>mindless translations.
[stuff deleted]
> to Ada and the wonderful tool they have to aid that transition.  I've had
> to critique a few of these efforts.  The translated Ada was appalling, even
> when the proponents were claiming that the program should be maintained (for
> decades) in Ada rather than its original, natural, language.  These efforts
> always seem to be presented as quck-and-dirty proofs-of-concept, with pro-
> mises that the final product will be truly wonderful, as soon as a lot of
> our tax money is spent.
> 
>                             Charlie

Wouldn't it be wonderful to be able to translate [relatively] hard to maintain
code to [relatively] easy to maintain Ada.  Wasn't maintain - ABILITY one of
the goals of the language and of the "mandate?"  When someone foists a
translator on us, we need to be able to show a useful Ada program that will
never reverse-engineer into FORTRAN, etc.  

In my research I've been using a program to run a back-propogation neural
network with delta learning rule and momentem terms.  There are about ten
FLOAT, STRING, and INTEGER parameters to the program that (in many cases)
significantly alter the run-time characterists of the code.  This neural
network learns and recognizes all sorts of input patterns.  The learning
methods are easy to "tweek."  etc.  All of this is done without recompilation.  

I am "_NOT_" telling everyone what a cleaver programming I am; I am just saying
that writing this in virtually any other language would be a real pain to
maintain.  

I am reminded about making a silk purse out of a ......

[Excuse me for taking up your disk storage but...]

A few years ago at the Nth Annual Ada Technology Conference someone presented
some hard facts about maintaining a set of FORTRAN programs vs. rewriting them
into [GOOD] Ada.  Ada won, of course, and I suspect the speaker was somewhat
slanted in his/her view.  However, the facts were indeed impressive because it
showed that Ada supports good software engineering practices in what can be an
effecient way.  It wasn't that Ada was the answer and FORTRAN wasn't: it was
that good Soft. Eng. IS the solution to actually saving money.

George

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