Ada cost breakpoints (was Re: Air Force helping to undermine Ada)

[mshapiro@MANTA.NOSC.MIL (Michael D Shapiro)]

Bob Munck recently wrote:

> Ada is mandated by DoD because a program that uses it cost less over
> its full life cycle.  The larger the program and the longer the life
> cycle, the higher the percentage saved.

This implies to me that for smaller programs with shorter life
cycles, Ada might cost more to use over the full life cycle.
Certainly a 23-line reformatting utility to be used one time and
discarded thirteen minutes later can probably be written in
SNOBOL4 or ICON (or even AWK) more cheaply than in Ada.  Has
anyone done a study to find these breakpoints?  One pair I've
heard mentioned as the appropriate minima for Ada are 500K
source lines of delivered code and/or seven years life cycle.

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Michael D. Shapiro, Ph.D.              e-mail: mshapiro@nosc.mil
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