Re: THAAD Study on Ada Viability

["Ken Garlington" <Ken.Garlington@computer.org>]

"Singlespeeder" <singlespeeder@btinternet.com> wrote in message
news:918u24$8ms$1@neptunium.btinternet.com...
: The point is though that the defense industry isn't going to upgrade the
: development environment and move their development wholesale onto these
: suites. Instead they'll stick with overstretched VAX/VMS machines, and an
: environment that may have been hot in 1983 but doesn't cut it in the 21st
: century - certainly not when trying to meet their 21st century timescales.

I dunno... my company (Lockheed Martin Aero) is moving off of VAXen and onto
other platforms as fast as possible (including legacy programs). We are also
using far more IDEs and upper CASE tools than before.

: If Ada is dead within the defense industry I believe that it's not the
fault
: of the language. Rather it's the fault of the IDE, and the unwillingness
of
: the buyers of defense products to move with the times. Ada has shown
itself
: to be capable of moving on, the decision makers in the Pentagon who
mandated
: not just the language but the toolset have not.

To the extent that Ada is no longer being used in the defense industry, I'd
say it was due to the issues originally raised in the NAS study a few years
ago, and generally supported by the THAAD study. In particular, since (at
least for the projects I support) the "decision makers in the Pentagon" have
gotten out of the language/tool mandate (with a few interesting exceptions),
it's hard to blame them for the use of obsolete systems!