Ada:

• Has better support for “ilities”
• Yields greater productivity
• Costs less per SLOC
• Has fewer defects
• Supported by multiple vendors

Ada represents:

• A DoD core competency
• Increased economies of scale
• An ISO and ANSI standard
• Freedom from proprietary solutions

From the Script: SLIDE 16 - Why Ada? (Business Arguments)

When viewed from a business perspective, Ada’s advantage is its support for open systems and interoperability.

The Ada language offers superior support of the "ilities," a set of desirable software characteristics that allow the programmer to take advantage of software engineering techniques. Many of them are also traits of open systems. We've touched on them throughout this presentation. They are: portability; availability/reliability; reusability; readability; and verifiability.

· Portability - The ability to move programs to different hardware platforms and environments, which we discussed earlier, can be extremely significant, given the rapid changes in the computer hardware market.

· Availability/Reliability - Ada compilers are capable of finding many programming errors at compile time or object time [Sammet, p. 731]. Ada 95 has sophisticated abilities to handle exceptions raised during execution, permitting recovery from conditions that might otherwise cause an error.

· Reusability - Though we just discussed code reuse, it bears repeating because of the tremendous implications for reduced costs. To successfully realize the productivity gain promised by reuse, the code itself must be both portable and reliable; as we have documented here, the Ada language was expressly written to meet these requirements.

· Readability - As we noted previously, Ada is by its nature very easy to read and interpret. In addition to the benefits already discussed, readability improves the possibility of code reuse by simplifying code evaluation for inclusion in a library or in another system.

· Verifiability - Ada does not specifically provide verification features. However, software verification is not an end in itself, but a means of achieving reliability. Ada provides reliability directly, without the additional abstraction of a verification process [Sammet, p. 731].

When taken together, these "ilities" add up to higher programmer productivity and lower system lifecycle cost.

The DOD is well into its second decade of using Ada; each new development represents potential increased economies of scale. The DOD has committed itself to the use and support of Ada.

Ada is being taught in universities, as well as in the service schools and academies.

It is the number one language in the embedded systems world.

Ada is an international standardized language that is engineered to help you avoid proprietary solutions.