From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.4.4 (2020-01-24) on polar.synack.me X-Spam-Level: * X-Spam-Status: No, score=1.3 required=5.0 tests=BAYES_00,INVALID_MSGID, MSGID_RANDY autolearn=no autolearn_force=no version=3.4.4 X-Google-Language: ENGLISH,ASCII-7-bit X-Google-Thread: 103376,119826e558c913d7,start X-Google-Attributes: gid103376,public From: michael_p_card@my-deja.com Subject: Ada vs. C++ in defense projects Date: 2000/11/03 Message-ID: <8tv04t$n80$1@nnrp1.deja.com>#1/1 X-Deja-AN: 689305823 X-Http-Proxy: 1.0 x51.deja.com:80 (Squid/1.1.22) for client 192.91.146.35 Organization: Deja.com - Before you buy. X-Article-Creation-Date: Fri Nov 03 18:28:57 2000 GMT X-MyDeja-Info: XMYDJUIDmichael_p_card Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada X-Http-User-Agent: Mozilla/4.7 [en] (WinNT; U) Date: 2000-11-03T00:00:00+00:00 List-Id: 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 Sent via Deja.com http://www.deja.com/ Before you buy.