Re: Is the "Ada mandate" being reconsidered?

[bell@most.magec.com (Roy M. Bell)]

I have just finished reading the web pages mentioned in earlier articles
with the title of: "Review of the Past and Present Contexts for Using
Ada Within the Department of Defense". I could tell the that the people
who wrote this synopsis were trying to be fair because they mentioned a
number of good things about Ada and some are fairly recent.

In my opinion the most important fact comes in the last sentence of the
first paragraph where they say the following: "Since 1977, the number of
programming languages used in DOD systems has declined from an estimated
450 to 37, four of which (Ada, C, Cobol, and Fortran) account for three
quarters of all source code."

I find the most disturbing statement in the middle of the second
paragraph to be the following: "Today, as commercial firms transition to
client-server based technologies and object-oriented programming
languages, they are shifting to C++, which is seen as a natural
extension of their experience with C."

I was under the impression the sales of C++ products and services to be
declining. Does anyone have any figures? I was under the impression that
the fastest growth was in the non-traditional 3rd generational languages
such as HTML, VRML, and graphical front ends for databases.

It is very common to see a custom language or custom application beat a
traditional 3rd generational language in specific small-scale
circumstances, but this doesn't mean that the mandated should be lifted.

The fifth paragraph contains the following: "In addition, the lack of
suitable software development tools, software libraries, and bindings
can inhibit use of a programming language. These elements enable
programmers to rapidly generate reliable code, reuse proven building
blocks of code written in other languages, and link with a wide range of
system software utilities." This is a fair point. I would also add that
the lack of a standard for C++ also makes reuse difficult.