DOD BACKS ADA WITH EDUCATIONAL FUNDS

Confirming its commitment to the Ada programming language, the Defense Department has issued a broad agency agreement (BAA) to fund the development of undergraduate curricula and courses and seed the university community for another generation of Ada programmers.

Under this program, DOD will provide $300,000 to $800,000 in grants to universities and colleges. DOD's BAA is the fifth such effort by the federal government to broaden the gene pool for its Ada work force but the first since the Defense Information Systems Agency took the program over in January.

The new program will focus more on viewing Ada as a methodology for software engineering rather than just a programming language, said David Basel, the DISA liaison in the Ada Joint Program Office. This emphasis reflects DOD's interest in Ada. Defense officials have touted the language because it imposes a certain discipline on programmers in ways that other languages do not.

DISA will accept proposals in three areas: Ada in traditional computer science, business, engineering, information management and related courses; significant new year-long course sequences in Adaoriented software engineering; and software engineering courses that focus on Ada 9X, the most recent version of the Ada language.

Universities receiving grants will be expected to develop course curriculum that can be disseminated to other undergraduate computer science programs. As a fringe benefit, DOD also will be looking for any tools or compilers that might be developed by the participants, according to the BAA.

The proliferation of information about Ada curricula has got more institutions interested in participating. "We are seeing more interest from universities," said Christine Anderson, director of the Ada 9X Project Office. "We are actually turning down some people because we don't have enough funding."

[Source: Monroe, John Stein. "DOD Backs Ada with Educational Funds," Federal Computer Week, Vol. 8, No. 17, July 4, 1994.]

DDC-I ANNOUNCES SUPPORT FOR THE INTEL PENTIUM PROCESSOR

On June 17, 1994, DDC-I, a global supplier of safety critical software development tools for developers of real-time embedded applications, announced a validated Ada development system targeting the Intel Pentium processor.

Ada support by DDC-I now makes the Pentium processor a powerful design choice for safety critical embedded systems. "Having the support of Ada opens markets early for the Pentium processor. We have provided hardware support to DDC-I for this validation, and we are pleased that our customers using any Intel architecture microprocessor from 8086 to the Pentium processor, have support from a stable and reliable safety critical tool supplier", said Chak Sriprasad of Intel, Military & Special Products Division.

The validated DDC-I Ada Compiler System (DACS TM) for Intel processors are available hosted on DEC VAX TM running VMS TM and Sun TM SPARC running SunOS TM and Solaris TM. The object format is OMF compatible and thus useable by a large number of third party tools. DACS also includes a symbolic Motif-based debugger.

[Source: Press Release from DDC-I. For more information, contact: Jennifer C. Sanchez, DDC-I, Inc., 410 N.44th Street, Phoenix, AZ 85008.]

ADA: THE CHOICE FOR SAFETY CRITICAL SYSTEMS

Safety Critical Software Systems refers to those systems that are critical to human life. Many industries, including transportation, nuclear energy, and medicine are in the process of setting specific standards for the development, testing, and certification of safety critical software. An area of key importance is the software language used as the basis for the final installed system. Standards specify that the language must be well-defined, have validated tools, enable modular programming, have strong checking properties and be clearly readable. Of all the programming languages available today, only Ada provides an appropriate baseline for safety critical software.

Ada has numerous properties which make it a natural choice for the development of safety critical systems.

• Ada is an ANSI and ISO standard - It is well-defined and stable, and provides a portable foundation for the development of supporting tools and libraries.
• Ada supports Object Oriented Design - It provides comprehensive support for abstraction and the reuse of tested components.
• Ada has a legible style - It promotes the satisfactory execution of certification steps, including peer review and walkthroughs, and simplifies maintenance tasks.
• Ada has a coherent, modular construction - Separate compilation facilities enable the application to be written as a set of units with interface specifications and dependencies clearly exposed, enabling the organized construction of a program from trusted components.
• Ada aids the detection of errors - Strong typing facilities ensure that most errors are detected statically by the compiler, and most remaining errors are automatically detected at execution.
• Ada limits the features used by a program unit - It exposes areas where potentially unsafe features may be used and allows special treatment and testing to ensure that the safety of the program as a whole is not compromised.

The era of safety critical software is just beginning. More and more aspects of our lives are being controlled by software. Thus, it is ever-important that software meet growing standards. Applications in Ada assure the highest standards of accuracy, reliability and certifiability.

[Source: "Safety Critical Software - The Ada Solution." Alsys world Dialogue, Spring 1994, Vol.8, Number 1.]