[CasearianDaoist]

Gig=did; Also there are ADA/C++ cross compilers. I know some of the people on the F22. It is going well this is just the usual caring. They are just rolling out the production bugs, the problems are mostly on the targeting acquisition system and some avionics integration issues, this process started less them 3 years ago. The "image" (as in radar) recognition system is having some problems. This is not unusual. The software architecture is wonderful and the avionics world is plenty of good ADA people, It is not a very hard language to learn, Real time concepts applied ot avionic is what is difficult. These isyems have there own Air Force/vendor "operationg systems" (perhaps morw aptly called "operating environments") it is unclear how whiching to another language is helpful

There is a real anti-f22 lobby, and it seems to originate in the Democrat party, at least in the US. The f22 is revolutionary and gives us an amazing edge over any other Air Force. Some people really do not want this. It will be fine if the program is allowed to go ahead.

[Criminal Number 18F]

[ADA] is not a very hard language to learn

True. It's basically an extended Pascal, and Pascal was once the teaching language in universities. The problem is, finding people motivated to learn it. Defence contractors don't want to spend money on people, so they want someone who already has a knowledge of ADA and a final security clearance. Means they are fishing in a small pond.

Many of the people opposing the F22 are those that oppose all defence innovations (John Kerry springs unbidden to mind). But the USAF has done an extremely poor job of selling this aircraft.

People who advocate changing to a desktop operating system don't understand just how unreliable those systems are. One avionics firm made primary flight displays that ran (underneath it all) on the NT kernel. They found that to pass FAA certification, much less stringent than military, they had to redo their software in a real-time OS. The Windows based system could not make the reliably standard by a staggeringly large margin.

d.o.l.

Criminal Number 18F