• Ada News - Week Ending: August 4, 1995 ***

           MTF EDITOR FINALIST FOR COMPUTERWORLD 
                 OBJECT APPLICATIONS AWARD

The Naval Computer and Telecommunications Station(NCTS), San Diego, announced they are a finalist for the 1995 ComputerWorld Object Applications Awards Program in the Reuse Category. Their submission is an Ada 83 system, Message Text Format (MTF) Editor v4.0. The winner will be announced August 16 at the Object World conference in San Francisco.

The Chief of Naval Operations project was co-sponsored by the Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA). DISA funded MTF Editor's reuse support to demonstrate the cost effectiveness of systematically planning and integrating reuse into an Ada development effort.

MTF Editor benefits the military community by enhancing the ability to generate validated military messages. At the same time, it reduces workload by eliminating the need for each user to maintain a knowledge base of the numerous formats required for various types of military messages.

The ability to develop and deploy MTF Editor on schedule was attributed to the emphasis on maximizing software reuse and use of the development environment, AdaSAGE. MTF Editor utilizes reuse components written in Ada 83, Pascal, and C++. MTF Editor is comprised of 415,000 source lines of code; of which 75% are reusable components. Documented savings attributed to reuse for this system was over $4 million dollars.

SOURCE: Ada Joint Program Office

SILICON GRAPHICS HAS FULL COMMERCIAL Ada 95 COMPILER

The first full commercial Ada 95 compiler, Silicon Graphics Inc.'s version of the Gnu Ada 95 Translator (GNAT), made its appearance at the recent Washington Ada Symposium (WAdaS `95), according to Government Computer News.

SGI's source code is available upon request, says SGI Ada project manager Dave McAllister. "That upon-request rule helps SGI track whoever has the code," he said. McAllister also noted the GNAT tool set is in use at some intelligence development sites and at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, Ohio and the Naval Research Laboratory in Washington. It was also used in the first Ada 95 development effort at Center for Software in the Defense Information Systems Agency.

Another hot topic at WAdaS `95 was a new Ada translation for the Interface Definition Language (IDL), a project of the Object Management Group. Several software developers have been working on a compiler to translate between Ada and IDL. OC Systems Inc. has submitted a "proof of concept" to the Object Management Group for mapping Ada to IDL. Oliver Cole, president of OC Systems, said others involved in the effort are MITRE Corp. and Objective Interface Systems.

SOURCE:
McCarthy, Shawn P. "Silicon Graphics has full commercial

        Ada 95 compiler."  Government Computer News.  17 July 
        1995.  [Phone: 301/650-2000, Fax: 301/650-2111, E-mail: 
        editoria@gcn.com]