Re: Required Metrics

[Robert Dewar <robert_dewar@my-deja.com>]

In article <24VQ4.8453$wb7.646902@news.flash.net>,
  "Ken Garlington" <Ken.Garlington@computer.org> wrote:
> By the way, while writing up a bug report, I found this in the
gnatinfo.txt
> file...
>
> "The Documentation for GNAT consists of two manuals, the GNAT
User's Guide
> and the GNAT Reference Manual. These are available in a number
of formats
> (ASCII, HTML, PostScript and info) and are bundled as a
separate
> documentation
> distribution and can be found at the same places as the GNAT
binary and
> source distributions."
>
> ...and I just had to laugh!


By the way, the documentation for GNAT very definitely
includes the Ada Reference Manual -- but perhaps that's a
surprise to Ken too ... hard to tell!

This thread is quite instructive.

I think the entire problem is that in the realm of software
engineering, you define a set of "requirements", and then
you can tell whether you have done a good job of implementing
the software by seeing if it meets these requirements.

It is, I guess, quite understandable, if quite wrong, for people
to make the mistake of thinking that a language definition is
like such a requirements document, and that you will be able
to tell if a vendor has done a good job of writing an Ada
compiler by seeing if it has met these requirements.

That's quite wrong of course, the defining language document
is not a set of requirements in this sense at all. Well more
properly it is a small part of the requirements. Left out
entirely are issues of performance, reliability, efficiency,
usability, maintainability etc etc.

By the way Ken, you questioned me saying that you were one of
the people arguing for inclusion of these ill-defined
requirements in the language. I may remember wrong, but I
distinctly remember you arguing for this approach in the
meetings we had on safety-critical requirements, and your
previous post seems to confirm that memory (the one where
you say that it was a waste of time attending that meeting).

I sure hope that SOME people reading this thread come away with
a little bit better understanding of what language definitions
are all about (and also an understanding of why validation
cannot guarantee usability or quality).



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