Ada95 references needed.

Ada95 references needed.

[Philippe Waroquiers]

We have successfully used Ada83 to develop some systems that are
currently operational (Flow Management over the European airspace).

We would like to use object oriented techniques for our future
developments.  In this area, we see 2 main choices : Ada95 or
C++.

In this framework, we are not searching for "theoretical" arguments
about the qualities of Ada95 over C++ (most of the people here agree
that the Ada95 definition is better than C++).  However, the technical
qualities are not the only factors we take into account.  Among
others, one (big) factor is where and for what Ada95 is used.

So, we would like to find as many references as possible of 
  * new projects using Ada95
  * projects that have converted from Ada83 to Ada95 (even without
    using a lot of Ada95 features).

The following informations would be interesting :
  - short description of the project
  - size of the code

Ideally, we would like to find projects similar to our projects (non-military,
non-embedded, european).
If you are an Ada95 user, please reply to this post (if it
can be public). 
Send us a private e-mail (if it cannot be public).

Note that we are also interested to have references of projects
that have converted from Ada to C++. We are interested in both
succesful and unsuccesful conversions :).



-- 
Philippe WAROQUIERS             Eurocontrol - Central Flow Management Unit
philippe@cfmu.eurocontrol.be    Rue de la fusee, 96
Tel: +32 2 729 97 35            1130 Brussels
Fax: +32 2 729 90 22            Belgium

Re: Ada95 references needed.

[Michael F Brenner]

In the last year I converted several projects from Ada-83 to Ada-95,
including HYTLIST (the hypertext link insertion tool, about 20,000 LOC),
a command and control system (800,000 LOC, of which 250,000 were
non-comment lines), the Braid Group Laboratory Software (about 10,000 LOC),
and some smaller tools. The largest of these (the command and control
software) required 300 lines of code to bring it up from a dialect
of Ada compilable by only one Ada-83 compiler to good Ada-95. HYTLIST
required no changes. The Braid Group Laboratory had problems with
the late changes to Ada-95 regarding unsigned numbers and wound up
costing a few weekends. In general, conversion from Ada-83 to Ada-95
does not take very much time for fully tested Ada-83 code. If you do not
have test programs to see how the Ada-83 code is supposed to work,
then you may have to write the test programs first. 

The biggest question you probably need to ask is not which programs
are 100 percent Ada, but rather, how easy is it for Ada to use
software and global variables from C, Java Byte Code, and Assembler
on the systems you will be connecting to. The big advantage of Ada-95
is the ease of substituting code in one language for another. I had
a contest with a veteran C lover writing a device driver (they wrote
it in C and I wrote it in Ada); the Ada code wound up running faster
(because of arcane rules of the hardware that I happened to know
more about); the Ada device driver was plugged into a system with
more lines of code in assembler and C than in Ada. 

Conversions from C to Ada might be replaceable by Ada calling C or
C calling Ada. That is one of the real strengths of Ada-95.

Mike Brenner mikeb@mitre.org

Re: Ada95 references needed.

[Robert Dewar]

Mike said

<<required no changes. The Braid Group Laboratory had problems with
the late changes to Ada-95 regarding unsigned numbers and wound up
costing a few weekends. In general, conversion from Ada-83 to Ada-95>>

It would be interesting to know what this refers to, especially since
Ada 83 has no support at all for unsigned numbers!

Re: Ada95 references needed.

[John Woodruff]

>>>>> "Philippe" == Philippe Waroquiers <philippe@gull.tact.cfmu.eurocontrol.be> writes:
In article <rcu3cqa13r.fsf@gull.tact.cfmu.eurocontrol.be> Philippe
Waroquiers <philippe@gull.tact.cfmu.eurocontrol.be> writes in part:

    > So, we would like to find as many references as possible of * new
    > projects using Ada95 * projects that have converted from Ada83 to
    > Ada95 (even without using a lot of Ada95 features).

The National Ignition Facility (NIF) is a $1.2-billion laser facility
under construction at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) in
California. The new laser will be the latest in a series of high-power
laser facilities used for research in inertial confinement fusion.

A key component of the DOE's Stockpile Stewardship and Management
Program, the NIF will help maintain the U.S. stockpile without
underground nuclear explosives testing.  The NIF is the next scientific
step to evaluating inertial fusion energy as an environmentally
attractive energy source. NIF will provide insight into the origin of
our universe by creating conditions similar to those at the center of
the Sun and other stars.

When completed, the NIF will house 192 beamlines that run the length of
the facility and deliver 2 MegaJoule pulses of optical energy on a
fusion fuel capsule the size of a BB in a pulse 25 nanoseconds long.
The NIF will occupy a building that is 704 feet long, 403 feet wide, and
85 feet tall, about the size of a football stadium (NIF would just fit
inside the New Orleans Superdome).

The NIF Integrated Computer Control System integrates about 40,000
control points.  ICCS must be highly automated and robust, and must
operate continuously around the clock.  We are using object-oriented
modeling to specify our software, and Ada-95 to implement the
distributed control system.

The ICCS is being developed using an iterative approach. This technique
is effective for projects whose requirements are not fully known until
late in the project development. Five iterations are planned prior to
the first facility deployment of the ICCS software.

Risks to the control system software are managed through a modern
object-oriented software framework that is used to construct all
applications and that will be extensible and maintainable throughout the
project life cycle. This framework is reusable across multiple
applications (and indeed other projects) and offers interoperability
among computers and operating systems by leveraging a common object
request broker architecture (CORBA).

The software development project is described on the web at
http://lasers.llnl.gov/lasers/nif/ICCS/index.html

--
John Woodruff                                             N I F   \ ^ /
Lawrence Livermore National Lab                         =====---- < 0 >
510 422 4661                                                      / v \