Re: Admiral Tuttle

[iris.mbvlab.wpafb.af.mil!blackbird.afit.af.mil!kmathias@uunet.uu.net (Ka rl S Mathias)]

srctran@world.std.com (Gregory Aharonian) writes:

>    On the Air Force / Army side, I do see many public accounts of successes
>with Ada and a fair amount of pro-Ada commentary from higher ups in these
>two services.  However, most of the non-Ada programming language success
>stories I see in the public press come out of the Air Force and Army. And
>to be honest, as much as I respect AFIT, a major training ground for Air
>Force officers, as measured by their language use in theses, Ada has not
>been overwhelming embraced.

This is incorrect.  Ada enjoys extensive use at AFIT and is used in all
applicable computer science courses.  It should be noted that thesis
work at AFIT, as in any graduate school, is concerned with new ideas and
concepts.  Neither Ada, C++, or any other language is always at the
forefront of a research area.  We select the best appropriate tools to
do our research and carry the concepts we learn away with us.  If we can
do it in C we can do it in Ada/C++/Lisp/Prolog/<insert a language>.  It is the
idea that is of primary importance in research, not implementation.
In general AFIT does not do product development, so the use of
Ada is not mandatory in most cases.  It shouldn't seem so odd then to see 
research theses using C, C++, Lisp, Prolog, Refine, and Ada coming 
out of AFIT.  

My thesis is the development of a theater level wargame, written in Ada,
that uses an X-Windows based front-end, also written in Ada.  That it is
written in Ada is not so important as that I am advancing important
concepts in developing reusable wargame components that can be executed
on a workstation instead of a mainframe.  You might be interested to
know that I am reusing an object-oriented database written for another
system (also written in Ada).

These views represent my own opinions and are not necessarily those of
the Air Force Institute of Technology or the Department of the Air
Force.


Capt Karl Mathias                                  kmathias@afit.af.mil
Graduate Student, Air Force Institute of Technology