Re: Ada cost breakpoints

[munck@STARS.RESTON.PARAMAX.COM (Bob Munck)]

In V93 #137, mshapiro@manta.nosc.mil (Michael D Shapiro) writes:
>Bob Munck recently wrote:
>
>> Ada is mandated by DoD because a program that uses it cost less over
>> its full life cycle.  The larger the program and the longer the life
>> cycle, the higher the percentage saved.
>
>This implies to me that for smaller programs with shorter life
>cycles, Ada might cost more to use over the full life cycle.
>Certainly a 23-line reformatting utility to be used one time and
>discarded thirteen minutes later can probably be written in
>SNOBOL4 or ICON (or even AWK) more cheaply than in Ada.

The esteemed and strange Dr. Shapiro is obviously alluding to the
serious problem now showing up in DoD programs in the
fractional-statement range.  We are beginning to realize that any Ada
project that does not involve at least a full legal Ada statement can
take femto-seconds to complete and cost $billions.  One project for a
service that I won't identify (but it's in the NNE corner of the
Pentagon) involves only the variable name and ":" of an assignment
statement (ending before the "=") now has a budget greater than that
of several European nations.

Bob Munck

(I realize that we don't really need more humor in Info-Ada as long as
we have the Ted and Greg Show.)