Ada in air/missile defense systems (was: Ada and NMD)

["Michael P. Card" <michael.p.card@delete_this_anti_spam_part.lmco.com>]

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Hello CLA-

I do not know about the US NMD program, but I do not think Ada will have
a significant role in European air defense systems. This seems strange
given all the talk about how Ada is more accepted in Europe than in the
US.

As it is now, the radar mission software for Medium Extended Air Defense
System (MEADS), which is being developed locally here at LMC Syracuse,
is going to be 100% C++ as I understand it. The plan is to develop a
"prototype" MEADS radar system for about 32-36 months under the RRE
(Risk Reduction Effort) phase of the contract, with mission software in
C++ (presumably to reduce risk?). Now the final contract for MEADS
specifies the use of Ada95, but it is not realistic to expect that the
MEADS consortium will be willing to throw out hundreds of thousands of
lines of C++ in favor of recoding it in Ada95, so the "prototype"
developed for MEADS will ultimately be the final system.

If the European MEADS consortium is willing to accept this, and if it is
true that Europeans are more Adaphiles than their American counterparts,
then I would not expect Ada to play a significant role in future
air/missile defense systems.

- Mike

Al Christians wrote:

> For all the commiseration about insufficient interest at large in
> Ada, there is a development looming that could possibly remedy that
> in a single stroke: the National Missile Defense plan.  This is a
> system so preposterous that one can only think about doing it with
> absurdly great software.  Is Ada the way to go for such a grandiose
> project?  Is anyone lobbying to make Ada the "Official Programming
> Language of the NMD"?  Why or why not?   If the software for this
> project gets done primarily in non-Ada, then we can suspect that
> Ada's time has passed.  If it gets done primarily in Ada, then the
> anemia of interest in Ada will be cured instanter by a gross
> infusion of pelf.
>
> Al

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