kent@xanth.UUCP (Kent Paul Dolan) (08/23/87)
In article <194@turbo.RAY.COM> gibian@turbo.RAY.COM (Marc Gibian SUD x 3393) writes: >I can not remain silent after reading the referenced posting. As a member of >the corporate world attempting to use ADA for one of its designated purposes, >embedded military systems, a validated ADA compiler for home computers seems >a useless piece of software. ADA was not designed to allow the development >of inexpensive compilers. It was designed (for better or for worse) for >military software, usually very large software systems, where the cost of >the compiler is a very small part of the overall budget. There are certainly >lots of things to fault in ADA, but this is not one. > >Marc S. Gibian [PLEASE, the lady's name is NOT upper case, and IS trademarked: "Ada(tm)".] As the POSTER of the referenced posting, I was simply responding to statements, by a DOD (AJPO) Brigadier General at an Ada Education conference in Hampton, Virginia, about 1984, and by the lady managing software reliability for NASA for the space station at an ODU CS department seminar in 1986, that it was becoming extremely difficult to meet staffing expectations or to budget training costs for Ada programmers, because there simply weren't enough of us around. My point, in my posting, was that there would be lots of experienced Ada programmers, just like there are now lots of experienced BASIC (yeech!) programmers, if Ada came free with the hardware. Considering the dollar figures being bruited around at these two meetings, it is my conviction that DOD could cost effectively create and GIVE AWAY compilers for home computers, just to increase the pool of experienced Ada programmers. It really doesn't matter whether all the home compilers are ever used for is writing new versions of Pac Man, as long as DOD gets sufficient good Ada programmers this way cheaper than by its current methods. The difficulty, of course, is finding a way, presuming my estimate is correct, for buying and GIVING AWAY compilers within the current Federal procurement regulations. That kind of challenge would make a very strong manager flinch! It would be much easier to buy them for DOD use for each targeted home machine (they are surely all in use by DOD somewhere!) and then sponsor a friendly freedom of information act suit to get tehm out to the public, but this would be too sneaky, I suppose. Sigh. Kent, the man from xanth.