Re: Rational ADA development environment

[ssawyers@cadfx.ccad.uiowa.edu (Steve Sawyers,212 ERF,,)]

From article <405@wmt.UUCP>, by sani@wmt.UUCP (Sandor Nieuwenhuijs):
> Does anybody have information about a software development environment
> for ADA, called "Rational" ?
>
I worked as a project leader using the Rational environment for developing
cockpit flight displays at my previous employer.

The Rational Environment consists of a special computer and operating system.
The operating system is written in Ada and the command line uses Ada syntax 
so you are constantly imersed in the programming language. The operating system,
the file management system, the source code control system and the compiler are
very tightly coupled to the hardware. The version control system is also built in.

The editor supports statement completion, on the fly syntax checking, automatic
documentation generation based on a specialized form of commenting, and the abil-
ity to require commnet and documnetation before a file is committed to compilation.

The system supports incremental compilation.

We were the first project to go full bore into the environment, and we took a bunch of 
Pascal programmers and winged it. The documentation generation was fantastic, the 
code completion minimized time spent with our heads buried in the manuals and the version
control was flawless. My personal estimate was that it saved 30-40% of the time usually
spent to do a project of this size (40,000 LOC and 2500 pages of documentation).

Its expensive (don't remember the exact $$ for the cpu etc), but well worth it. You do have to watch for overloading the system and killing the response time. We found about 10 programmers was about right, 15 was too many.


Steve Sawyers
ssawyers@cadfx.ccad.uiowa.edu