Re: Is the "Ada mandate" being reconsidered?

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

Tom Robinson said

"And, *I thought*, that the DOD was required to use validated compilers.  But
I could be wrong on that.  But *if it does*, then in order to sell to the DOD
companies would need to be on the validation list.  Since the list is extremely
small when compared to Ada 83 I use it as the measure of how far along the
Ada 95 market is today.  One measure of how successful Ada 95 is will be how
fast that list grows in the next 12 months as the gnat and AdaMagic based
compilers start hitting the market."

Using this list for this purpose is misleading, since, as I noted in my
previous message, the list includes compilers that are not Ada 95 compilers
at all, and does not includes most of the dozens of ports of GNAT, which
is the most complete Ada 95 implementation around.

During the transition period, a significant number of DoD projects are
using non-validated compilers, including GNAT. In particular, Airfields,
the first deployed Ada 95 DoD application (if you know an earlier one,
speak up :-) used GNAT on a non-validated platform (Solaris).

Sure it will be interesting to see how fast the list grows, but much more
interesting is to see how fast the list of projects using Ada 95 grows,
which is not necessarily the same measure at all.

Remember that the validation suite that corresponds to the ACVC suites
you are used to (which cover the whole language and require 100%
compliance) will not be in use for another year yet! Your viewpoint
may be appropriate for a year from now, but during the transition period
the situation is quite different.

P.S. for a more detailed explanation of how Ada 95 validation works,
you can visit the Thomson home page. They have a page discussing the
important things to look out for in evaluating Ada 95 validations.
It's not completely general, because (not surprisingly :-) it is most
concerned with contrasting the Thomson validation with others, but it
is useful reading on the subject!