Re: Ada in Australia (was Ada ad in Embedded Systems Programming stinks)

[eachus@spectre.mitre.org (Robert I. Eachus)]

   In article <38us16$c0e@godzilla.zeta.org.au> andrewl@zeta.org.au (Andrew Lees) writes:

   > Where there have been problems, the root causes have been in the
   > management domain rather than the technical.  This is so on both
   > of the projects that have had some difficulties.  On the project
   > that has not had difficulties, the same applies: the reason for
   > its success has been consistently excellent management.

In article <38v140$sdu@sunb.ocs.mq.edu.au> cperrott@krakatoa.mqcs.mq.oz.au (Chris Perrott) writes:

   > Well, yes and no. Ada 83 provides a way to get the address of a
   > procedure, but doen't provide a way to _call_ a procedure using
   > its address. Management decides that the project is to be done in
   > pure Ada, and forbids use of assembly language to call a procedure
   > using its address.

   Is it just me or did everyone spot the irony here?  Ada 83 does
provide mechanisms for calling procedures given addresses, and for
that matter for embedding assembler.  It's just that the stnadard
(correctly) points out that these things are dependent on
characteristics of the implementation .  Good management reads this as
a reason to encapsulate the dependencies in a limited part of the
code, clueless management forbids the use.

   The most ridiculous example of this was a revision request for Ada
9X where the functionality requested was already provided by
Unchecked_Conversion.  The request was of course turned down.  But the
requestor responded that Unchecked_Conversion was not a solution--his
company coding standards did not allow him to use it!

    The only good news in all this is that we have found that it is
harder for poor (or worse) management of an Ada development project to
get the project in a state where the only viable option is to cancel
it.


--

					Robert I. Eachus

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