Re: Air Force shows how meaningless Ada waiver process is

[chris@D012S436.mch.sni.de (Christopher Costello)]

Robert Dewar (dewar@cs.nyu.edu) wrote:
: Mike, to your claim that Ada companies bet on sales to the DoD under the
: Mandate. Poppycock! at least if you are talking about all companies. ALsys
: was a French company which always had far more employees in France than
: in the US, and concentrated on sales in Europe where there is no mandate.

not quite true - in Europe the military (including NATO) have
policies regarding Ada. Someone more in the know might be able
to say whether these are more or less stringent than the US "mandate"

: Alsys has shifted its emphasis somewhat with the Telesoft merger, but I
: would still be willing to bet that a big part of its revenue comes from
: non-DoD sources (including such US customers as NASA and Boeing commercial).

: As for the claim that the mandate is responsible for the perceived poor
: quality of Ada tools (a broad brush characterization that is not at all
: generally fair -- there are good Ada tools and bad Ada tools around), I
: know this is a popular view from the vendor-bashers club of which you
: seem to be one of the founding members, but apart from a lot of rhetoric,
: I have never seen any convincing argument that this is the case.

: In fact, you could well argue that the failure of vendors to generate
: sufficient revenue to support continued improvement etc was due to the
: mandate not being enforced well enough, although that's also a hard
: after-the-fact argument to make convincingly.

: There - that should start a nice thread of diatribe. Perhaps I should
: have changed the subject line to something more flamboyant :-)


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