Re: Ada (was Rival JSF teams fly final STOVL flights with flair, highlight strengths)

["Ken Garlington" <Ken.Garlington@computer.org>]

"Bob" <rfritz@home.com> wrote in message news:3B6A15C3.8B3A9277@home.com...
: Ada is a programming language developed by DOD. The first standard was
published
: in 1983 (after a multi-year selection and refinement process involving
Hundreds of
: people in industry, government, and the military)  and another updated
design was
: published in the mid 90s. It is a strongly typed language like Pascal that
was
: inbtended to support embedded programming. For a while it was mandated by
law for
: programs, but that was relieved some years ago. The 90s version
incorporated
: objects.
:
: The language is fine, but it is expensive because commercial use never
caught on.
: Tools are extremely expensive and available for only a few target
computers.
: Several late-80-s - early 90s aircraft projects were caught in the Ada
mandate
: F-22 among them.

Actually, none of the statements above are quite true:

- Ada is still used today on new commercial projects,
- There are free, open source, and commercial versions of Ada toolsets
available for a variety of platforms, including processors that run
Microsoft Windows, Linux, and a variety of embedded OSs.
- F-22 and other projects used Ada before there was a mandate, and continue
to do after the lifting of the mandate.

: Today most DOD projects use C or C++. C++ is basically Ada with full
polymorphism
: (objects)and C syntax.

This is just plain wrong.

: Actually, most C++ these days is just C compiled with a C++
: compiler. Object oriented systems in my experience do not provide any
advantage in
: real time development. I'm sure  a lot of Ada zealots will flame this
: statement,.but I have worked on C4I, signal processing, and now flight
control for
: UAVs and obect oriented design helps very little, and then in very obscure
parts
: of the system. Simple old techiques of modularity, high cohesion and low
coupling
: are more directly applicable.
:
: IMHO, Ada was killed by its proponents who made it a holy writ rather than
a tool.
: The more it was crammed down peoples throats the more they resisted.
Another
: factor was that the implicit development paradigm shifted from the 80s
model of a
: central computer with a lot of remote terminals (VAX) to the current
: workstation/PC on a net model.
:
: The central computer allowed one compiler to serve many so a
multi-thousand dollar
: price tag was acceptable. But if each programmer had his/her own computer
with
: several times the Vax computing power having a local compiler made sense.
Borland
: and Microsoft provided Pascal or C/C++ for a few hundred dollars for each
PC, and
: SUN/HP/SGI were not very much more per station. In fact the Gnu compiler
for C/C++
: is quite good and is free, and versions are available for both Windows and
Unix.

Not surprisingly, this is also true of the GNU Ada toolset!

: Ada continues as a legacy language, with systems being derived from the
projects
: of the 80s/early 90s, but there are not a lot of new starts. One
interesting note
: is that most of the Boeing digital airliners use Ada, meaning any versions
that
: have fly-by-wire. But my view is that Boeing makes the tool work well for
them
: rather than the tool creating quality systems by virtue of its own
qualities.
:
: I actually like Ada as a tool, but time and economics have passed it by.
:
: It should also be noted that many of the people that gave you Ada went on
to work
: at the DODs Software Engineering Institute (SEI) that gave us the highly
: bureaucratic and expensive 5 level software process ratings.

This is also a highly incorrect characterization of the Capability Maturity
Model (presumably what is meant by "process ratings").

For more information on the Ada language, see comp.lang.ada

: Bob
: UAV Software Lead
:
: Buescher Family wrote:
:
: > What is Ada?  The computer language?  Anyone care to explain?
: >
: > Geoffrey
: >
: > Ken Garlington wrote:
: >
: > >
: > > Well, it's true LM was an early adopter of Ada (anticipating the F-22
EMD
: > > contract requirement, as mandated by the U.S. Congress). The statement
is of
: > > course wrong in every other respect. Considering that the tarverbot
can't
: > > even spell software (literally!), I suppose one true item in a sea of
: > > inaccuracies is the best we can hope for...
: