Re: THAAD Study on Ada Viability

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

In article <918u24$8ms$1@neptunium.btinternet.com>,
  "Singlespeeder" <singlespeeder@btinternet.com>
wrote:

> What I find fustating about ADA is the IDE.

This is a little peculiar, *the* IDE? there are of
course many such ...

> I know it was the first language
> supposed to have one from the start

Nope, that's reinventing history. To what are you
referring?

> but frankly working in defense it's
> still DEC ada 83 and the DEC LSE while the rest of
> the world moves on.

Only a small part of the Ada world is still using
DEC Ada 83 and DEC LSE. Yes, a significant part, but
if you have the view that all DoD projects are using
this combination, you have a very narrow view of the
Ada world.

> Even ADAGIDE is a great improvement (I've even
>taken to developing on a PC under
> ADAGIDE then FTPing back to VMS for final builds,
> formal testing etc).

AdaGIDE is a nice tool for students, but there are
many IDE's out there (GLIDE, GRASP, SNIFF, APEX ...)
for serious development use. Sounds like you are
not familiar with any of these.

It really sounds like your problem is not the state
of Ada and its IDE's but rather the state of the
particular development environment you find yourself
in.

> Then of course ACT looks good

Well thanks for the comment, but I have no idea what
it means in this context, are you referring to the
use of GLIDE as your IDE?

> The point is though that the defense industry isn't
> going to upgrade the development environment and
> move their development wholesale onto these suites.
> Instead they'll stick with overstretched VAX/VMS
> machines.

Again, an amazingly narrow viewpoint. You are
assuming that the environment you work in is
the one used throughout the defense industry, but
that's entirely incorrect. Very few defense projects
are still using VAX machines.

> If Ada is dead within the defense industry I
> believe that it's not the fault
> of the language. Rather it's the fault of the IDE,
> and the unwillingness of
> the buyers of defense products to move with the
> times.

*Some* buyers of defense projects, please do not
assume your experience is typical of all projects.

>Ada has shown itself
> to be capable of moving on, the decision makers in
>the Pentagon who mandated
> not just the language but the toolset have not.

Individual programs may have mandated specific tool
sets, but the "Pentagon" never did anything of the
kind. Even early in Ada days, many different
environments, IDE's, architectures, and Ada compilers
were in use, and only a fraction used Vax'es and
DEC Ada 83. Now the fraction using this obsolete
technology is much smaller (yes, of course we know
that Ken Garlington is stuck in such an environment
:-) but he is the first to know that that does not
mean everyone else in defense is similarly stuck.

An interesting indicator here is that it would be
technically quite straighforward to port GNAT and
its IDE to a Vax, but there has never been any
serious commercial interest in doing so, from DEC
or from any user. Whereas there has been interest
in porting GNAT to all kinds of other architectures
in defense contexts, including not only standard
architectures (including OpenVMS/Alpha, which is of
course supported by GNAT) but also non main-stream
architectures such as the 750 and the i960. I am
talking here strictly about interest from the defense
community -- your community :-)


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