At 01:34 PM 3/12/97 -0500, Hal Hart wrote:
>...  I am also very
>sympathetic to the general notion that the Government should
>minimize telling us contractors "HOW" to do our business

Is there a strong requirement that whenever Ada is NOT
mandated, the acquisition must be structured such that the
Government will NEVER need to maintain or upgrade the code?

Otherwise we're right back where we were in 1977, with the DoD
having to have programmers trained in a vast and random
selection of languages, keeping obsolete hardware needed to
run obsolete compilers, choosing among multiple revisions of
languages (and now of GUI development tools, 4GL
translators, etc.)  Heck, it'll probably even make it necessary
to bring back The Village People and Disco.

Remember, the original reason for DoD-1 was not to make a
better language; that was just a happy by-product.  Ada was
created to give us ONE language, no dialects, very infrequent
language revisions, with code transparently portable among
compilers, host systems, target systems, and development
environments.

Bob Munck
Mill Creek Systems LC