Re: If not Ada, what else...

["J-P. Rosen" <rosen@adalog.fr>]

Le 11/07/2015 04:31, Paul Rubin a écrit :
>> Well, once upon a time Ada compilers were certified. I don't believe
>> > AdaCore does that anymore.
> There was some federal agency that did it, I thought.  It was eventually
> shut down after it had served its purpose, which was getting
> standardization to really mean something.
> 
You are confusing two different things here. The AJPO (Ada Joint Program
Office) was a government agency established to start and develop the
language. It was closed when the language was considered grown up. It
was not in charge of validation.

There is a an organization, the ACAA (Ada Conformity Assesment
Authority) in charge of validation, whose "technical agent" is Randy
Bruckardt, and an ACAL (Ada Compiler Assesment Laboratory), currently
Adalog, in charge of doing the validations.

So the whole structure is in place if a vendor asks to validate its
compiler. What happens is that since the major customers don't require
validated compilers any more, and since validation is quite expensive,
nobody does it anymore. But if a big customer of AdaCore said they would
sign the contract only if the compiler is officially validated, I'm sure
AdaCore would do it.

There is also a kind of side effect of validation: it is so much
connected to the Ada spirit that every compiler keeps passing the
validation internally, and all the users know that the compiler is
passing the validation internally - therefore reducing the need for
official validation. AdaCore even provides a certificate of "internal
validation" without official value, but good enough for most customers.

-- 
J-P. Rosen
Adalog
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