Re: INFO-ADA Digest V93 #522

Re: INFO-ADA Digest V93 #522

[CONROY WILLIAM F]

This forum is extremely interesting to listem to some of the threads.  I 
work in a large govt organization trying to live with the ADA mandate.  
It is extremely interesting to hear the holy wars and the argument to 
follow the mandate because and only because it is law.  I'd like to give 
you some comments for thought:

ADA is a tool, it is only a tool.  It is extremely good for some problem 
domains, very poor in others.

The problem in the DOD the ADA mandate was addressing was the total lack 
of standards and the inability to perform software verification on 
complex mission critical systems.  A second extremely subordinate point 
is the ability to reuse code and attempt to have platform independance.  

Another aspect of the problem is the C++ vs ADA issue.  ADA is a very 
good language designed by academics to support the verification process.  
It has some really lousy implementation aspects which have been covered 
for days in this forum.

Final problem:  The world is driven by $$$$.  The ADA mandate was pushed 
through in a period when the govt had the arrogant opinion that we could 
enforce our standards by law, forget the cost.  This created a situation 
where a few companies produced OK compilers at high cost, extremely slow 
compile times, with minimal optimizations.  The ADA mandate completely 
violates the concept of the free market system.  The C++ world, and I 
agree C++ is certainly not a silver bullet, is not driven by a mandate.  
Rather it is driven by market forces which are much stronger.  As a 
result we are seeing cheap, robust compilers which survive by being 
responsive to the needs of the customer in terms of speed and features.  
Pick up a computer rag and see how many add on ADA packages exist which 
actually solve problems?  If you can find them, what is the cost?  As a 
program management office I am resposible for producing computer systems 
which "fix" real world problems within a decreasing budget.  ADA is just 
a tool, a rather expensive tool.  I am required to pay top dollar for 
decent, not spectacular, programmers.  I have to spend a lot for 
compilers which are incredibly sloooowwww.....  I find the source code 
extremely portable as long as I stay with one vendors implimentation and 
don't use any of the vendor supplied libraries for anything like graphic 
i/o or other non standard capabilities.  Finally, I put up with a process 
which takes an absolutely ludicrious number of years for the language 
committee to fix basic <read basic> language architecture problems. 

Finally, AT&T in their switching circuits have the same requirements for 
robust verifiable software that we have.  With the country in significant 
 trouble economically, how can we support spending a significant premium 
to use a niche language, give up access to languages being driven by the 
same market forces driving us.  If you SERIOUSLY want ADA to be the 
language it could be, you need to emphasize places where ADA has actually 
an advantage over other languages in fixing "real" problems.

Send flames to congress or /dev/null

PS. I do comply with the ADA mandate and it costs the US taxpayer a 
significant premium with no significant benefits over other tools we 
could have used.


Bill Conroy  <conroyb@tiberius.safb.af.mil>