Re: Gov't, non-DoD use of Ada

[gwinn@res.ray.com (Joe Gwinn)]

In article <50p6ldINNall@faatcrl.faa.gov>, Ron Thompson
<thompsor@admin.tc.faa.gov> wrote:

> All government agencies have public affairs offices that will
> happily provide all the factual information available to the
> public, which is nearly everything most of us do. You own it.
> While it can be frustrating and difficult to navigate the
> system(s) in order to get that info, it is there. While that
> info may not support a position or agree with an assertion,
> it is there. 

I don't know how much credence I would put in the party line from the PR
dept.  That's why I don't bother to ask.  And I know technical people who
were there.


> 1. The FAA will "permit" whatever language the approved system
> design indicates.

That isn't what the last two FAA RFPs I worked on said.  They said that
one could choose between C and C++; Ada was excluded by omission.  We have
it by usually reliable channels that this omission was not an accident.


> 2. "AAS debacle" would have happened even if it was done in 
> the most popular, most approved by newsgroups, most Win95
> compliant, Java friendly, Hot Cool Web Browsing lanugage in
> the entire free global village. "AAS debacle" had little to
> none to do with the language. Most debacles don't. 

I agree, but so what?  I'm not the FAA.  And, I would be terrified to use
such trendy stuff anyway -- all that stuff is vaporware, and certainly not
something I would bet civilian airliners on.  However, C is widely and
successfully used in ATC.


> 3. We may have been born on a weekend, but not last weekend.
> If you limit development to C and C++, and you are the govt,
> you will be sued.

Not at all.  They are buying full-custom, and can have it in any language
they want.  And, the main language of the ATC world is C, not Ada, so it
would be hard to criticise their choice of C.  There is probably ten times
as much C as Ada used in ATC applications.  It matters not at all that
Thompson/CSF has been using and touting Ada.


> 4. While the waiver system has somewhat waivered, your overall
> writing indicates that the FAA would immediately reject
> anything that came in that wasn't c, c++. It implies that the
> FAA would deny any system concept written in Ada. Man, can
> you imagine the lawsuits?

See comment on item 3, above.  It seems to me that the FAA is talking only
about the final implementation language.  I'm not sure what a "system
concept written in Ada" would be, unless you mean Ada PDL.  I don't know
that anybody has tried that wrinkle out on the FAA lately.  We (Raytheon)
actually implemented a Canadian ATC system in C with Ada PDL in the mid
1980s, as Ada83 compilers weren't then ready for prime time.  It turned
out to be a bad idea -- the language models were too far apart.  We got it
to work anyway, but wouldn't do it that way again.
 

Joe Gwinn