Re: Ada Core Technologies and Ada95 Standards

[dewar@cs.nyu.edu (Robert Dewar)]

"Perhaps some mechanism could be devised to encourage or
require _all_ vendors to use this tool. (Nah - how could we
ever get all vendors to agree to use some common measure of
compiler quality? It's insane! Except for the ACVC, of course...)"

The policy has been not to go beyond conformance testing in the minimum
requirement imposed by centralized policy on validated compilers. I think
that is a sound decision, since it leaves much more flexibility for the
project officers. Ken, it sounds like you want to have someone forcing
you to do the "right thing". It is up to you to specify an Ada compiler
that meets your requirements. One component over which you have no
choice is that it must meet ACVC requirements.

Other requirements, e.g.

  ISO 9000 certification
  SEI maturity level certification
  ACES performance testing
  Certification of full path testing
  Successful testing with the NPL tool

are up to you. Are they a waste of money? Yes for some users, No for 
other users. You are interested in one particular application domain,
for which all of the above may be appropriate, but it would be a mistake
to mandate that ALL users of Ada in the DoD for ALL purposes have no 
choice but to require all these features. This would increase tool
cost to no purpose for applicatoin areas in which some or all of the
above criteria are irrelevant.

Yes, I can see how you would like to spread your costs, but the fact of
the matter is that a non-critical accounting application written in
Ada does NOT need this level of testing. On the contrary, such an
application might have other requirements, e.g. to pass the ADAR
decimal arithmetic tests, which for you would be irrelevant.

That's really the issue here -- how much to REQUIRE of all vendors in
all fields. The decision to go no further than ACVC testing as being
universally mandated is very deliberate, but it is assumed that
application domains will specify whatever they need. Certainly in
the past there has been a considerable level of naivity in some
procurements, with an assumption that validatoni is the sole criterion
for determining whether or not a compiler is suitable for intended
use. Clearly different domains will have different requirements,
and it is up to the PEO or whoever is in charge to make sure that
the requirements are stated and met.