Subscribe to the Free Print Edition!
Celebrating 25 Years

GCN Home > June 28, 1999 issue

Ada helps churn out less-buggy code

S. Tucker Taft, who led the Ada 9X language design team from 1990 to 1995, is now president of the Ada Resource Association, organized last year to maintain the language standard after the Defense Department closed the Ada Joint Program Office.

Since 1980, Taft has worked for AverStar Inc., formerly Intermetrics Inc., of Burlington, Mass. He is technical director of the distributed information technology solutions division.

At AverStar, he has headed development of three new compilers based on Ada95. The first generates Java byte codes, the second creates optimized ANSI C, and the third generates code for the Sharc digital signal processor from Analog Devices Inc. of Norwood, Mass.

In the 1980s, Taft helped design the Ada Integrated Environment for the Air Force. Taft, the great-grandson of President William Howard Taft, graduated summa cum laude from Harvard College in 1975 with a bachelor’s degree in chemistry.

GCN senior editor Florence Olsen interviewed Taft by telephone from his Massachusetts office.

GCN: After its long and checkered history, why do you think Ada is still a useful language?

TAFT: Ada is good at detecting errors in programs early in the programming lifecycle. You submit your code to an Ada compiler, and it will inform you right away that you made mistakes that a lot of languages would let go right by. For some people, that’s the bottom line. Errors cost money. The sooner you catch them, the less they cost.

If the compiler misses an error, Ada has another line of checking when you run the program. People who use Ada generally find that if the program makes it through the compile-time and run-time checks, it’s remarkably close to doing what it should. That gives them a sense of productivity and pride in the quality of their work.

GCN: Does the Defense Department still share your positive opinion of Ada?

TAFT: I hope so, but I wouldn’t say actions recently have backed that up. The problem is, DOD is a huge organization that has a three-year total turnover at certain levels. Someone who had a good experience with Ada may have moved on, so you end up having to re-educate over and over.

Some big military programs committed to Ada are just getting to the coding stage, so the number of compilers being sold into military programs is on the rise.