Re: Open Systems closed to Ada?

[eachus@mitre-bedford.arpa (Robert I. Eachus)]

    I'm not going to quote any of Fred McCall's broken record,
especially since most of it just ain't so.  The DoD mandate says use
a validated Ada compiler.  The validation rules go on to say what
validation of an Ada compiler means.  It has never meant, and never
will mean strict conformance to a particular standard.  (Godel proved
that impossible quite a while ago.)  Validation sets a standard of
quality, and provides a process for determining whether a particular
deviation from the ACVC tests can be justified.

    In particular if a compiler vendor has an Ada compiler which
includes some Ada 9X features, or adds support for rate-monotonic
scheduling or what have you, it is not automatically rejected.
Instead, any deviations are evaluated to determine if the vendor's
justification is in fact acceptable.

    In practice the ARG acts as a court of last resort in such cases.
If the fast reaction team (FRT) or the ARG feels that an issue needs
further discussion, the validation certificate in question is issued,
and the test in question is withdrawn if necessary until the issue is
resolved.  Starting with ACVC 2.0, this process will be further
streamlined to encourage vendors to offer such (legitimate)
extensions, and also to allow vendors to release new technology
sooner.

    There have been cases where some members felt this was used by one
vendor or another as a sort of sneaky loophole, but others didn't.  In
this case the rule is effectively innocent unless unanimously found
guilty.  In other cases--even though the test was correct and the
compiler was wrong--a test was withdrawn because the ARG felt it was
counterproductive.  We even have a class of AI called pathology,
informally defined as "we'll tell the vendors what they should do, but
no user, and especially no ACVC test, should expect it to work that
way."

     So validation and the Ada mandate are NOT intended to stiffle
innovation or limit creativity.  They are intended to insure that long
lived source code is still useable ten years from now, without a lot
of support costs.  You don't like that, play in another sandbox.  I
can find you companies which mandate FORTRAN, C, C++, COBOL, and LISP,
but you probably wouldn't be happy with any of them.  The company
policy is there for the same reason as the DoD policy, and your
difficulty seems to involve having rules to enforce software
engineering standards.

--

					Robert I. Eachus

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