Keith H. Bierman    [log in to unmask]   wrote

> The Ada model, as I understood
> it, was to have a huge requirements gathering group, a fairly reasonably
> sized requirements establishing group, and a number of small competing
> drafting groups.

Before Ada '83, there were at least five rounds of requirements' gathering
for what was at the time called DOD-1.  Requirements were refined between
the requirements' gathering rounds.  The final requirements document was
known as Steelman (predecessors were strawman, woodenman, tinman, ironman).
Four contractors were chosen to write proposals based on Steelman (SRI, IBM,
Intermetrics and Ichbiah).  Ichbiah and his team won the competition, and
produced the final design.  I don't know whether they ultimately wrote the
precise words in the standard.

I reviewed all five requirements documents, and all four proposals.  DOD
did not seek me out -- I sought them out and asked how I could participate.
I went to a meeting at Purdue and discussed features for computational
mathematics with Colonel Whittaker.

For Ada 95, the process wasn't so open, so widely publicized, or so intense.
Ultimately, AJPO (Ada Joint Program Office) hired a contractor (Intermetrics?),
who deployed seven employees to work full time for a year to develop the 1995
standard.  At least that's my understanding of it, which may be flawed.

Although Wirth was not involved officially at any stage, his fingerprints
are all over Ada.  At a seminar I sponsored at JPL on 5 March 1998, Wirth
was asked what language he would use for a mission-critical application.
Without hesitation, he said "Ada."  My own knowledge of Ada, and Wirth's
remark, are reasons that I have frequently advocated to get well-tried
features of Ada fitted into the Fortran framework.

The Fortran community and the Fortran committees don't have the kinds of
resources that the DoD threw at Ada.  Contrary to Giles's assertion that
much of Fortran development consists of inventing bizarrely inconsistent
and untried features out of whole cloth, however, the Fortran committee
is able to bootstrap some of the DoD investment in Ada.

--
Van Snyder                    |  What fraction of Americans believe
[log in to unmask]       |  Wrestling is real and NASA is fake?
Any alleged opinions are my own and have not been approved or disapproved
by JPL, CalTech, NASA, Sean O'Keefe, George Bush, the Pope, or anybody else.