Re: Rant! (was) Development process in the Ada community

[dennison@telepath.com (Ted Dennison)]

"Kent Paul Dolan" <xanthian@well.com> wrote in message news:<75e7bccb730eda7db554601b66ba9814.48257@mygate.mailgate.org>...
> "Darren New" <dnew@san.rr.com> wrote:
> 
> > It's very simple to learn, too. Way easier than either Java GUI, and
> > relatively high-level, but relatively limited due to being high-level
> > and portable. You don't get 3D, or round windows, or dancing menus with
> > talking paperclips.... wait a minute... that could be a benefit too!
> 
> Ummm.  Actually then, that could be a problem, since a fraction of Ada
> use (I have no idea how much) goes into stuff like flight simulators and
> combat theater simulators.  I don't think limited functionality graphics
> would fly as a standard Ada GUI (though I'm talking way past my
> knowledge base at this point, so it is time for me to choose this leaf
> as a point at which to bow out of this bough of this discussion tree, I
> suspect).

For the flight simulators I've worked on, generally you have several
systems, including at a minimum a dedicated operator station for the
instructors (which can be non-realtime and contains nice GUI's), a
host machine (hard real time, no GUI), and an IG (Image Generator, a
dedicated real-time 3D graphics generator). The host gets the most
benifit from Ada. For the IOS, you really need to build everything
with a GUI builder. If any Ada is there, it will only be glue code (or
in some cases, generated by the GUI builder). The IG's we usually get
off the shelf from an IG vendor (eg: Vitals from FlightSafety or
Compu-Scenes from Lockheed Martin), and they are very expensive. I
don't know if any of them use Ada, but I doubt it.


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