Thus spake the DoD...

[dickey@ssc-vax.UUCP (Frederick J Dickey)]

[gourmet line eater snacks: * * * * *]

The DoD has announced its intention to make Ada the single, common,
computer language for Defense mission-critical applications. Presumably,
this means that if you have a Defense mission-critical application of AI, 
then you're going to program it in Ada. Is this reasonable? Is this
possible? Now I happen to work in an AI group of a large aerospace
company located in the general vicinity of Seattle, WA, so the answers
to these questions are of considerable interest to me. What do people
out there on the net think about this? Should AI people rush out and 
buy Ada manuals? Sell their Symbolics stock? Roll over and play dead?
Or what?

To help get this discussion off the ground, I am including three
hypothetical responses to my questions. 

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HYPOTHETICAL RESPONSES
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[response from Byron Kapse: I do all my AI programming in Ada. Lisp is an 
archaic dinosaur from the 50's. Ada is the language of the 80's. It's the 
first non-von Neumann language. It results from years of research into 
concepts that encourage and enforce good programming practices. Ada is the 
basis for a new culture of software engineering. The AI community can
definitely benefit from the discipline that results from the use of Ada.
The DoD is well advised to mandate the use of Ada for embedded applications, 
including embedded AI applications.]

[response from John McCadr: No way the DoD is going to use Ada for AI; they're
out of their minds. Give me one example of a significant AI system written in
Ada. It's is a von Neumann nightmare! Using Ada is like trying to brush 
your teeth with a strait jacket on. If you paid Ada programmers 5 cents a line 
to code Ada, they'd become millionaires. The DoD is going to have to admit 
that Lisp is the only way to go. Modern Lisp environments represent over 
thirty years of experience. We know how to do it. A programmer at a Lisp 
workstation like a Symbolics or LMI can blow the socks off any Ada programmer 
alive.]

[response from John Q. Programmer: Why can't we have our cake and eat it too? 
I have a product specification for a Lisp that is based upon Ada. Apparently, 
what this product does is take Lisp source code and translate it into Ada. 
So if the DoD says "do it in Ada," all you have to do is show them the 
translated code and they'll be happy while you can do your coding in Lisp. 
Besides that, this product allows you to combine the symbolic processing 
capability of Lisp with the number crunching capability of Ada. You get 
the best of both worlds! This really looks like the way to go.]