Re: Is DoD simulation ignoring using Ada?????

[Bob Crispen <crispen@EIGHT-BALL.HV.BOEING.COM>]

Doc Elliott <helliott@LOSAT.REDSTONE.ARMY.MIL> sez:

>    From the POV of one who deals with this on a everyday basis, there are some
>explanations in order.  First of all, based on previous posts here in CLA,
>there
>are no tools available to support Ada bindings to the DIS protocol (yet?).

Doc, just about everyone who did a demo at I/ITSEC in the past 3 years
has developed a nice set of DIS Ada bindings and probably socket
bindings as well.  Developing Ada bindings isn't rocket science; it's
well within the capabilities of somebody with a year or two of Ada
experience.

The fact that some folks are charging megabucks for Ada bindings is
shameful and dumb, considering the wealth of Ada talent within the
Services and their Primes.

But put all that aside.  Surely somebody has developed for one of the
Services a simulator in Ada that has a DIS interface.  Just reuse
their bindings.  You already paid for them once.

Now as to why the heck those things were originally developed in C,
I may join Greg on that one.  Shame on those folks.  In fact, the
more or less mandated use of the C coordinate transform code last
year gave us (and anybody who didn't define their radians values as
plain old FLOAT) some constraint error problems.

Finally, the Ada Simulation Validation Program final report noted
(in 1987!) that Ada was a perfectly wonderful simulation language.
Service folks, you paid for that program.  In the meantime we and
lots of others have written all kinds of simulations in Ada.

>The SGI platform that most of our Virtual Prototypes run on is rich with
>such tools as Paradigm Sims (audio) and Software Systems Multigen which works
>well with the Paradigm "Vision Works" tools.  All of this stuff is C based,
>commercially available, pretty well rung out, and has a good user base.

Calling C from Ada is an old, well-known trick.  You or someone else
there already knows how to do it.  In some situations, you can even
make a shell script to do it automatically.  Where's the problem?
Ohhhh -- it's a "non-standard", non-portable trick.  Jeez, the guys
who are up to their asses in single-source, proprietary hardware and
software sure start getting religion when they talk about Ada, don't
they?

Yes, I know you're talking about the perception versus the reality,
but isn't it incumbent on anyone in engineering to squash nonsense
when (s)he hears it?  Good Lord, I've become Greg.  Stop me before
I post again!
+-------------------------------+--------------------------------------+
| Bob Crispen                   |   Who will babysit the babysitters?  |
| crispen@foxy.hv.boeing.com    +--------------------------------------+
| (205) 461-3296                |Opinions expressed here are mine alone|
+-------------------------------+--------------------------------------+