Re: logarithms on ada (digressed to project adaptation)

Re: logarithms on ada (digressed to project adaptation)

[Marin David Condic, 561.796.8997, M/S 731-93]

Robert Dewar <dewar@MERV.CS.NYU.EDU> writes:
>John McCabe said
>
>  You misunderstand what I'm saying here - it's not that *projects* are
>  slow to adapt, it's that they don't adapt at all.
>
>That's much too great a generalization. We are finding a lot of projects
>that do want to adapt to Ada 95 over time. Perhaps one of the most
>dramatic examples of this is the significant demand for a port of
>GNAT to the VAX from several large projects. These are certainly
>not projects that are furiously adapting to the latest hardware,
>but they see the move to Ada 95 as a way of getting more milage
>out of existing hardware on an existing project.
>
    Maybe it's useful to remember that "large" may not be the point.
    We have a "large" (1m+ slocs) application in house that was
    originally done in Ada and is little by little migrating to C++.
    (Mostly an issue of early-on decisions about GUI builders, etc.
    I'm still trying to get them to look at ObjectAda - but haven't had
    the time to wring out all the installation problems.) Now *they*
    can migrate because it is a data-base/user-app kind of thing where
    the way it is tested is to release it to the user community and
    see who screams about what.

    Then there are things like my little rocket project which is in
    the 60ksloc range (pretty large as controls go - especially
    getting it packed into one address state on a 1750!) Once it runs
    the Qual Engine it will *NEVER* change programming language. (That
    actually gets cast in concrete rather early on because of the cost
    of software verification.) If we were even to switch versions of
    the compiler, we'd have to run through a humungous amount of
    testing to requalify the software - then requalify it in engine
    tests.

    So what makes it hard for Ada83 jobs to migrate to Ada95 is
    exactly what got Ada83 in there in the first place - the demand
    for highly reliable, stable, long-lived software. Migrating from C
    or Cobol or whatever will be along similar lines - not size of
    software, but impact of change on the system.

    MDC

Marin David Condic, Senior Computer Engineer    ATT:        561.796.8997
M/S 731-96                                      Technet:    796.8997
Pratt & Whitney, GESP                           Fax:        561.796.4669
P.O. Box 109600                                 Internet:   CONDICMA@PWFL.COM
West Palm Beach, FL 33410-9600                  Internet:   CONDIC@FLINET.COM
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