Re: A proposal for Tri-Ada '94

[dewar@cs.nyu.edu (Robert Dewar)]

Greg, why not spend some more of YOUR OWN MONEY, which you seem quite happy
to spend on your quest, whatever it is (assuming that for you like all of
us, time is money), and produce your accurate number. I am sure it will
be treated with the respect it deserves. As for me, I must not be part of
the world, since I find I can proceed without knowing this number :-)

More seriously, I think such a raw overall number would in fact be about
as meaningful as Greg's statistics on theses (one of the few of his numbers
that I am in a position to know its significance, accuracy and value).

What would be much more significant is to know the number of recently started
projects that include coding either in 3GL's, 4GL's or Case Tools that do
not use Ada.

Incidentally, I importantly include Case Tools, since people, especially
at a high management level in industry and in DoD are being seduced by
the story that Case tools eliminate the need for programming completely,
and therefore, since there is no programming, there is no more issue of
what programming language is being used.

(In fact of course, Case Tools are little more than compilers for very high
level languages which work very nicely on appropriate examples, but when 
pushed into areas not best suited for them, end up being processors for
highly incompetently designed languages and lots of junk code results. I
found 4GL's a more honest term frankly. Interestingly, as far as I am
concerned, it matters not one whit whether the case tool generates Ada,
C or double dutch, if the generated code is never seen by humans, and
never treated as anything else than an intermediate language by the
compilation system. THe point is that you are programming in input to the
case tool, and that's what should be examined for legitimate consideration
of whether it should be in Ada.)

Thought for the week: how much in taxpayers money is being taken up by
GA's postings (or anyone elses for that matter). You have to consider
disk space on govt funded machines, traffic on govt funded networks,
and time spent by govt funded employees (Let's me off the hook, not one
cent of my time is paid by the government :-)

Robert