Use of Ada in the NIF

[gioia@pacbell.net (Gioia Tauro)]

Look at this paper from the NIF staff "The National Ignition Facility:
Early Operational Experience with a Large Ada Control System"

http://www.acm.org/sigada/conf/sigada2002/SIGAda2002-CDROM/SIGAda2002-Proceedings/Carey.pdf

"The organization is aware that the rate of defect reporting is
increasing, and interprets this as a sign that the product is
immature. 

...

"Since control room operation started, the rate has been at its
highest, exceeding 300 per month (385 SCRs were filed in October 2002,
the last month for which data are available). The high rate is
attributable mostly to the intense scrutiny due to multiple test
cases, and to the first-ever
integration of all subsystems in a hardware test that fires
experimental shots."

Would you have the same situation when a control room staff operations
start up for a NASA satellite ? Absolutely not. I would suggest
keeping an eye on whatever can be known about the actual operations
for NIF to learn whether Ada and the software process it implies have
actually been applied.