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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.