Re: Legislative Mandate for Ada

[emery@linus.mitre.org (David Emery)]

>From: bwb@sei.cmu.edu (Bruce Benson)
>I sat in a meeting where an individual (working in one of the military
>service DoD secretariets) insisted that any university that got
>federal money (ROTC, research grants, etc.) should be told to teach
>Ada or have their money taken away.

Actually, I think there's something to be said for this idea.  Even
more, I think that any DARPA or DoD-funded project should submit a
waiver request to do their work in something besides Ada.  Such
waivers should be reasonably easy to get, but there are a lot of
research projects that could be used on gov't systems, except for the
fact that they're implemented in languages that create a significant
maintenance/adaptability problem (e.g. C, lisp).  

However, unless and until Ada compilers are as affordable as C
compilers (e.g. Gnu C), such a requirement will be financially
untenable, since most schools are unwilling to fork out the $$ for an
Ada compiler.

				dave