Re: Is Ada preferred over C/C++ for the realtime domain?

["Marin David Condic" <dont.bother.mcondic.auntie.spam@[acm.org>]

Just to clarify a bit on "The Mandate". It wasn't dropped because of a lack
of Ada expertise. It was dropped because the DoD commissioned a study on DoD
software requirements that concluded that Ada was fine for mission critical
software but shouldn't be a requirement for other software & recommended a
process by which projects should justify language choice based on life cycle
costs. The decision ended up going further than the study recommended by not
requiring Ada for anything and insisting projects justify language choice
based on life cycle costs.

The idea was not to discourage the use of Ada but to enable project managers
to look at the application at hand and make an intelligent decision about
what made sense for that particular situation. (For example, an application
that might be really graphics intensive or perhaps have a large AI
requirement would then be allowed to use some language or development
environment that had really good support for those features, rather than
require Ada, which is a more general purpose language.)

It did tend to get interpreted as "The DoD is ditching Ada!!!", which is
understandable, but incorrect. There are still lots of DoD software projects
that use Ada because it is well suited to a wide range of their problems.
There are also lots of commercial Ada projects as well - especially where
high reliability, long project life and real-time/embedded considerations
are a big deal.

MDC
--
Marin David Condic
Senior Software Engineer
Pace Micro Technology Americas    www.pacemicro.com
Enabling the digital revolution
e-Mail:    marin.condic@pacemicro.com


"Pat Kohli" <kohli@ameritel.net> wrote in message
news:3CBF7A7A.A67B7D92@ameritel.net...
>
> the embedded telecom code is C/C++.  Years ago Ada was mandated as a
> non-functional requirement for US military applications.  At some point
the
> brass realized there was a shortfall of Ada expertise, given the US
military's
> SW requirements.  The requirement went away as a mandate; and Ada lives on
as a
> language which is particularly well suited to RT applications:  cruise
missiles,
> fly-by-wire, etc.  You don't see Ada used in writing clients for
relational
> databases, much, though, w/ the lapse in the military mandate.
>
>
>
>