Programming Language: Status, Costs, and Issues Associated With Defense's Implementation of Ada

In 1974, Defense's future software development costs were estimated at more than $3 billion annually. At that time, over 300 programming languages were being used on Defense systems, making it difficult to move application programs among computer systems and expensive to maintain these programs. In response, Defense initiated work in 1976 that led to the development of the Ada programming language in 1979, Ada was established as a military standard in 1980, and was approved by the American National Standards Institute in 1983 and by the International Standards Organization in 1987. Also in 1987, Defense established a policy calling for the use of Ada for all computer applications, except where the use of another language could be demonstrated to be more cost-effective. To examine Defense's use of Ada, GAO planned to obtain information on all Defense projects that were using or planning to use the Ada programming language. In October 1987, Defense identified 123 Ada projects. However, this list of Defense projects was incomplete. By March 1988, an additional 76 projects had been identified. As agreed with the Subcommittee, since the total number of Defense projects using Ada could not be identified, we limited our work to information obtained on 100 Ada projects.