From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.4.4 (2020-01-24) on polar.synack.me X-Spam-Level: X-Spam-Status: No, score=-1.3 required=5.0 tests=BAYES_00,INVALID_MSGID autolearn=no autolearn_force=no version=3.4.4 X-Google-Language: ENGLISH,ASCII-7-bit X-Google-Thread: 103376,42427d0d1bf647b1 X-Google-Attributes: gid103376,public From: dewar@cs.nyu.edu (Robert Dewar) Subject: Re: Ada Core Technologies and Ada95 Standards Date: 1996/04/16 Message-ID: #1/1 X-Deja-AN: 148088780 references: <00001a73+00002c20@msn.com> <828038680.5631@assen.demon.co.uk> <828127251.85@assen.demon.co.uk> <315FD5C9.342F@lfwc.lockheed.com> <31729038.20BF@lfwc.lockheed.com> <31735952.42B@lmtas.lmco.com> organization: Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences newsgroups: comp.lang.ada Date: 1996-04-16T00:00:00+00:00 List-Id: "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.