Ada VIABILITY

  • Increasing acceptance in USA

    • - 50M SLOC 3GL code base in DOD Weapon Systems
    - Increasing non-DOD and commercial use
    - Ada increasingly taught in universities
    - Ada 95 provides enhanced object oriented features
    • GNAT Ada95 freeware compiler likely to encourage use
    • JAVA WWW language has partial C++ syntax and Ada95 semantics

  • High degree of acceptance in Europe

    • - NATO requires Ada; European vendors rarely request waivers

  • High degree of acceptance in Far East

    • - Compiler sales greater than US and Europe combined

Ada market appears to be stable or increasing

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From the Script: SLIDE 18 - Ada Viability

As you have seen by the last few slides, Ada is gaining acceptance in the US. We saw that a significant portion of the DOD weapon systems source code is Ada; that there is increased non-DOD and commercial use of Ada; that there has been a continuing increase in the number of universities that teach Ada as a foundation language; and that the upgrades in Ada 95 (and the free GNAT Ada 95 compiler) are likely to contribute even more to this increased use.

There is also a very high degree of acceptance of Ada in Europe. This is reinforced by the fact that European projects rarely request waivers from European Defense groups or from NATO.

Ada's acceptance in the Far East is indicated by the fact that sales of Ada compilers is greater than in the US and Europe combined!

So the Ada market appears at worst to be stable - but perhaps even increasing. Much of the data does not really account for the effects of Ada 95. For example, there is no good data on how much the availability of a high quality free Ada 95 compiler on the Internet is doing to increase the use of Ada 95. However, based on anecdotal conversations with Ada Core Technologies, the maintainers of GNAT, it is clear that many organizations that were not previously looking at Ada are now at least trying Ada 95.