Re: Future of Ada?

[Matthew Heaney <matthew_heaney@acm.org>]

jamwahl@badlands.nodak.edu (Jim) writes:

> I am just wondering what those who frequent this news group think
> about the future of Ada.  I've heard a lot of talk that Ada is kind of
> dying out and that not even the military is using it any more.  Any
> comments would be greatly appreciated.

You may be thinking of the US DoD's change in policy wrt contracting
software intensive systems.  Way back when, the government had a
putative rule that all software for weapons systems had to be written in
Ada.  This policy is sometimes refered to as the "Ada mandate."

However, the government is moving to an acquisition policy in which
software source language is but one factor in a systems engineering
study, and so Ada has, thankfully, been liberated from the mandate.

If you want more info about Ada, then here's a couple of sites you can
surf:

<http://www.adahome.com/>
<hhtp://www.adaic.org/>

I know adahome has a link containing myriad examples of companies that
use Ada.  One recent example is the Paris Metro: there's a new line or
something that uses control software all written in Ada.  Another
example is Boeing's new 777: the software is almost all Ada.

So the news about Ada's death has been greatly exaggerated.  Lots of
shops are using Ada, and not just for military apps.  (I'm working on an
electronic intellegence app right now, written in Ada83, and the next
release is going to be written in Ada95.)

You can try Ada for yourself.  gnat, a member of the gcc family, is a
zero-cost, high quality Ada95 compiler available for a variety of
platforms.  gdb is also fully ada-aware, as is emacs.

<http://www.gnat.com/>

A new version, 3.11p, should be out any day now.  ACT is just cleaning
up a few ends wrt the WinNT release.

I use gnat 3.10p on a Mac 7500/225, running Linux for powerpc.

<http://www.linuxppc.com/>
-- 
Those who believe in the supernatural should be required to learn
computer programming.  This would force them to discover that things
which appear at first to be completely mysterious and incomprehensible,
in fact have a logical (and usually simple) explanation.  --J.B.R. Yant