Re: C++ Standardization (was: Once again, Ada absent from DoD SBIR solicitation)

[demer@cdfsun03 (David Emery)]

Nasser said:
...
>If someone is not smart enough to see an advantage in using Ada,
>let someone smarter than them take advantage of this fact, and 
>produce better software using Ada, which means they'll sell
>more software and make more money with less completion, since the
>end customer only cares about the quality of the product, not what
>language it was written in, let the free market and the free 
>competition decide. (When I go buy a car, I only care that it is
>a good quality car, not HOW and what tools where used to build it).

The problem with this is that it takes the "commercial" view of things.
If my Mac crashes, usually the results are a few cusswords, 15 minutes
lost time, and I reboot.  But this "market-based" model doesn't work 
for safety-critical or embedded systems.  It's really rough to have to 
reboot an airplane in mid-flight.  And it's very difficult to send an upgrade
to every washing machine in the world, when the software has a bug in it.

For military systems, my life could very well depend on the system working
correctly the first time (this is no idle comment, I'm in the U.S. Army 
Reserves...)   We can't afford to wait for version 3.1 of a strategic
defense system to work correctly; after the first usage the bugs will 
all probably end up looking like Mothra...  

Unfortunately, the current market-driven commercial software model does 
not place a high value on quality.    This is why following commercial
models is not the right view for most (but not all) defense projects.  And
it's why regulatory and acquisition agencies (not just the DoD) have
standards, policies and mandates.  

In the military domain, mandates make sense.  Nassar's model works OK in
the commercial domain, -if- quality becomes a significant factor in 
that domain.  

				dave
--
<.sig is away on vacation>