Problems With DOD-STD-2167

[macrakis@HARVARD.HARVARD.EDU (Stavros Macrakis)]

Agreed: Dod needs to do some work in making its software development
standards reasonable.

Agreed about functional decomposition vs. other approaches.

I have never understood the structure of Dod software development
standards, but I understand they are trying to incorporate prototyping
and the like into at least one of these standards.

20.10  I believe this is intended to keep programmers from using the
traditional method of making run-time executive calls.  In the olden
days (before Ada), real-time tasks typically were scheduled using such
calls as 
	call RepetitiveProcess(subroutine_name,time_interval)
which would call the subroutine every so often.  Note that the
subroutine did not have a thread of control from one execution to the
next, so all state information had to be kept in global variables.

What 20.10 also appears to exclude, incorrectly, is the use of Ada
tasks for coroutining (cf. Jackson -- but the technique goes back
about 20 years before Jackson).

As for 
   Sadly, both DOD-STD-2167 and MIL-HDBK-287 treat Ada as "just another
   coding language with some 'advanced capabilities'" which must be mapped
   into the FORTRAN mindset.
perhaps they are just being realistic.  It is going to take many years
of education (more than just training) to get old Fortran/Jovial/CMS-2
programmers into Ada-land.

Isn't there some mechanism for commenting on 2167?

	-s