WHITAKER@A.ISI.EDU (08/24/90)
ABET Meeting in Washington DC (7-9 August 1990)
Report by William A. Whitaker
ATLAS (Abbreviated Test Language for All Systems) is an IEEE
Standard, a version of which (C/ATLAS, IEEE Std 716) been
adopted by the DoD and is specified for maintenance test
programs. It is the basis for test programs for such
systems as the Air Force MATE. Recently DoD has been
pushing for the use of Ada in all applications, including
ATE, in order to get commonality with factory test,
simulation, built-in test, etc. Maintenance test has been a
tight community based in recent years on ATLAS. IEEE SCC
20, the ATLAS standards committee, recognized this customer
pressure to take advantage of Ada in this context and set up
an "ABET" (ATLAS/Ada Based Environment for Test) working
group to develop the Ada binding for ATLAS. The Summer 1990
ABET meeting was sponsored by the Air Force, demonstrating
their commitment to the effort.
The whole Committee so far has concentrated on Requirements
and Rationale documents, only recently has technical work
begun in earnest. The ATLAS interface, which might be
considered the main binding, the Ada specs that correspond
to ATLAS semantics, is making progress. For this they have
an extensive draft by Jeudha Ziegler of ITT under STARS
sponsorship. So while there is no official draft standard
by the committee, this is an available document to comment
against.
Work so far has been concentrated on scoping the product,
determining how much it must look like ATLAS and how much
good Ada practice can be introduced. I introduced to
possibility that all physical units should be strongly
typed, so that voltage cannot be added to time! Other
technical questions to be studied include how best to
represent data bits in Ada, recognizing the PACK limitations
of some compilers. A system for handling issues, similar to
AIs is being set up to document the development.
Likewise there were drafts of Test Equipment Configuration
Language (implementing TEDL - IEEE P993) and Instrumentation
Programming Language (implementing RDL - IEEE P981) provided
by Charles Morris of Lockheed Sanders. Since nobody
presently seems to be implementing TEDL, an ABET prototype
might be the first exercise of this "soon to be" standard.
There are 3 more meeting of the ABET subcommittee already
scheduled: Florida in October, Washington in February (5-7),
and Germany in May of 1991.
ABET is an example of an applications area in which Ada can
make a great contribution, and which should be carefully
monitored to assure that it fully exploits Ada capabilities.
So far there has been no participation in the Working Groups
from the Ada community. The implications of this you can
judge for yourself.
THdihe Chairman of ABET is Richard Weger, AAI Corp, PO Box 126,
Hunt Valley, MD 21030-0126, (301) 628-3634.
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