On Wed, 13 Mar 2002, Greg London wrote: > I've worked on fly-by-wire software for the Boeing 777. > It was written in Ada, the most god-awful strict language > I've ever worked in. But since the software is what actually > keeps the airplane in the air, its good that its strict. > > But Rockwell also took three times as many man-hours > to VERIFY the code as it did to DESIGN/WRITE the code. > It was a 8 year project just for one black box. > > Ada didn't make good code, the managers and the responsibilty > that the programmers had made good code.
Actually the funny thing is that when I worked for the other aircraft manufacturer they used 2 languages for on-board systems: ADA and... assembly language! The reason was not the fact that the languages were better than anything else, that they increased productivity or anything similar: those were the only ones that had FAA certified compilers (or assembler). In fact the language was irrelevent (hence they had no problem using assembly), but the process was quite tight, QA was pretty strict. Michel Rodriguez Perl & XML http://www.xmltwig.com
