Re: Ada vs. C++ in defense projects

["Tom Hargraves" <tharg@vtcinet.com>]

The US company I work for are currently bidding for a multi million $ US
Navy project and specifying java as the implementation language. This proves
there is no logic in this world, and is the reason I am learning Java. Such
is life...

I am just thankful they didn't choose C++

Tom H.


<michael_p_card@my-deja.com> wrote in message
news:8tv04t$n80$1@nnrp1.deja.com...
> Hello everyone (this is in response to Mike Silva, Richard Riehle et
> al)-
>
> I am on a project now which is mixed Ada and C++. I find it frightening
> that many defense contractors are pushing C++ for critical defense
> systems. C++ is, IMO, an extremely poor choice for defense systems for
> many reasons, not the least of which include portability, readability,
> maintainability, and memory corruption due to invalid type casts and
> over-writing array bounds. As far as I am concerned, there is no
> financial or technical justification for using C++ on these kinds of
> projects. RE: the "high cost of training people in Ada," I know of an
> excellent source of Ada training we have used in the past at about
> $1K/student. I would wager we have spent far more than that per C++
> programmer chasing bugs caused by uninitialized data structures, bad
> type casts, overwritten array bounds etc.
>
> IMO, the only reason C++ is chosen by mgmt and some engineers is that
> most of us remember the big defense downturn of the late 80's and early
> 90's. If you want to go work for Microsoft or a dot com, or if you want
> your resume ready just in case, it is a lot better to be able to say "I
> managed a team of 50 C++ programmers and we developed a 40 KSLOC
> distributed real-time C++ application" or "As a S/W engineer at company
> X, I wrote 10 KSLOC of C++ on my last project." Because of this "resume
> factor," engineers and managers in the defense industry are willing
> (albeit often unintentional) collaborators on the move to C++.
>
> When you couple this with amazing trends like the preference for Windows
> NT as the information infrastructure for the CVN-77 (new Navy carrier),
> you can begin to believe that it would be in America's best interest for
> the government to pay M$ to re-write Windows, Office, Access, Project
> and SQL Server in Ada. The way I see it, M$ would like it since they
> could improve their products at taxpayer expense, consumers would get
> more reliable software, and the DoD would get a better infrastructure
> for the CVN-77 and future projects! (tongue-in-cheek here)
>
> - Mike
>
>
> Sent via Deja.com http://www.deja.com/
> Before you buy.