Are you aware of any of the Defence projects for which the language has been used?

Ada was mandated for use by almost all significant Defense department software projects for approximately 10 years, from 1987 to 1997, and there were a large number of such projects. In the early years there were real challenges because of the immaturity of the Ada compilers. In the later years, in part because of the early difficulties, there were a number of projects that applied and received "waivers" to allow them to use other languages. Nevertheless, in the "middle years" of 1989 to 1995 or so, there was a boom in the use of Ada, and much of it was quite successful.

As far as specific projects, the Apache helicopter and the Lockheed C-130J (Hercules II Airlifter) are two well-known examples. The Lockheed C-130J is particularly interesting because it was developed using a formal "correctness by construction" process using the SPARK Ada-based toolset from Praxis High Integrity Systems. The experience with that process was that, compared to industry norms for developing safety-critical avionics software, the C-130J development had a 10 times lower error rate, four times greater productivity, half as expensive a development process, and four times productivity increase in a subsequent project thanks to substantial reuse. NASA has also used Ada extensively for satellite software, and documented significantly higher reuse than their prior non-Ada systems.

In general, in study after study, Ada emerged as the most cost effective way to achieve the desired level of quality, often having an order-of-magnitude lower error rates than comparable non-Ada systems after the same amount of testing.

Can you elaborate more on the development of the Static Interface Analysis Tool (SIAT) for Ada on behalf of the NASA Space Stations IV&V?

The SIAT project was an early attempt to create a browser-based tool for navigating through a complex software system. The particular use in this case was for analyzing the software designed for the large network of computers aboard the International Space Station. It turns out that these systems have a large number of data interfaces, where one computer would monitor one part of the Space Station and report on its state to other computers, by what amounted to a large table of global variables. The SIAT tool was designed to help ensure that the interfaces were consistent, and that data flowed between the computers and these global variable tables in an appropriate way.

Are you aware of why the Green proposal was chosen over the Red, Blue and Yellow proposals at the start of Ada's development?

The Green proposal reached a level of stability and completeness earlier than the other designs, and Jean Ichbiah did an excellent job of presenting its features in a way that the reviewers could understand and appreciate. Although there were flashes of brilliance in the other designs, none of them achieved the polish and maturity of the Green design.

Did you ever work closely with Jean Ichbiah? If so, what was the working relationship like and what did you do together?

I worked on and off with Jean during the final days of the Ada 83 design, and during some of the Ada "maintenance" activities prior to the start of the Ada 9X design process.

Jean was busy running his own company at the start of the Ada 9X process, but did end up joining the process as a reviewer for a period during 1992 and 1993.

As it turned out, Jean and I had quite different views on how to design the object-oriented features of the updated language, and he ultimately left the project when it was decided to follow the design team's recommended approach.