Re: Ada News Brief

[mfeldman@seas.gwu.edu (Michael Feldman)]

In article <dewar.845384950@merv>, Robert Dewar <dewar@merv.cs.nyu.edu> wrote:

[snip]

>Ada programs are typically highly portable, but it is important not to
>oversell this feature. I once heard the project director for the IBM
>air traffic control system say that Ada 95 must guarantee that their
>application move without changing a single line of code. The mere fact
>that someone could state this obviously unrealistic requirement worried
>me at the time, since it seems to me that anyone working with large
>Ada applications should have a more realistic view.

Hmmm - now that FAA seems to be moving toward using other languages, in
addition to Ada, I wonder if that PM would set the same requirement for
the subsystems written in... oh, say... C++.

Or was this just another subtle exercise in holding Ada to a much higher
standard (unrealistically so, perhaps) than other languages? 

Mike Feldman