Ada vs. C++ in defense projects

[michael_p_card@my-deja.com]

Hello everyone (this is in response to Mike Silva, Richard Riehle et
al)-

I am on a project now which is mixed Ada and C++. I find it frightening
that many defense contractors are pushing C++ for critical defense
systems. C++ is, IMO, an extremely poor choice for defense systems for
many reasons, not the least of which include portability, readability,
maintainability, and memory corruption due to invalid type casts and
over-writing array bounds. As far as I am concerned, there is no
financial or technical justification for using C++ on these kinds of
projects. RE: the "high cost of training people in Ada," I know of an
excellent source of Ada training we have used in the past at about
$1K/student. I would wager we have spent far more than that per C++
programmer chasing bugs caused by uninitialized data structures, bad
type casts, overwritten array bounds etc.

IMO, the only reason C++ is chosen by mgmt and some engineers is that
most of us remember the big defense downturn of the late 80's and early
90's. If you want to go work for Microsoft or a dot com, or if you want
your resume ready just in case, it is a lot better to be able to say "I
managed a team of 50 C++ programmers and we developed a 40 KSLOC
distributed real-time C++ application" or "As a S/W engineer at company
X, I wrote 10 KSLOC of C++ on my last project." Because of this "resume
factor," engineers and managers in the defense industry are willing
(albeit often unintentional) collaborators on the move to C++.

When you couple this with amazing trends like the preference for Windows
NT as the information infrastructure for the CVN-77 (new Navy carrier),
you can begin to believe that it would be in America's best interest for
the government to pay M$ to re-write Windows, Office, Access, Project
and SQL Server in Ada. The way I see it, M$ would like it since they
could improve their products at taxpayer expense, consumers would get
more reliable software, and the DoD would get a better infrastructure
for the CVN-77 and future projects! (tongue-in-cheek here)

- Mike


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