Ada programming language

Ada is a structured, statically typed programming language designed by Jean Ichbiah of CII Honeywell Bull in the 1970s. It is positioned to address much the same tasks as C or C++, but with the type-safety of a language like Java. (Some cite Ada as an influence on Java.) Ada was named after Ada, Lady Lovelace, often credited as the first computer programmer.

Contents

1 Features 2 History 3 "Hello, world!" in Ada 4 The Ariane 5 failure 5 See also 5.1 Online tutorials 5.2 Organizations 5.3 Compilers 5.4 Tools 5.5 Related programming languages 5.6 Related topics 6 References 6.1 International Standards 6.2 Books 7 External links

Features

Ada was originally targeted at embedded and real-time systems, and is still commonly used for those purposes. The Ada 95 revision, designed by S. Tucker Taft of Intermetrics between 1992 and 1995, improved support for systems, numerical, and financial programming.

Notable features of Ada include strong typing, modularity mechanisms (packages), run-time checking, parallel processing (tasks), exception handling, and generics. Ada 95 added support for object-oriented programming, including dynamic dispatch.

Ada supports run-time checks in order to protect against access to unallocated memory, buffer overflow errors, off by one errors, array access errors, and other avoidable bugs. These checks can be disabled in the interest of efficiency, but can often be compiled efficiently. It also includes facilities to help program verification. For these reasons, it is very widely used in critical systems like avionics, weapons and spacecraft.

It also supports a large number of compile-time checks to help avoid bugs that would not be detectable until run-time in some other languages or would require explicit checks to be added to the source code.

Ada's dynamic memory management is safe and high-level, like Java and unlike C. The specification does not require any particular implementation. Though the semantics of the language allow automatic garbage collection of inaccessible objects, most implementations do not support it. Ada does support a limited form of region-based storage management. Invalid accesses can always be detected at run time (unless of course the check is turned off) and sometimes at compile time.

The Ada language definition is unusual among International Organization for Standardization standards in that it is free content. One result of this is that the standard document (known as the Reference Manual or RM) is the usual reference Ada programmers resort to for technical details, in the same way as a particular standard textbook serves other programming languages.

History

In the 1970s, the US Department of Defense (DoD) was concerned by the number of different programming languages being used for its projects, many of which were obsolete or hardware-dependent, and none of which supported safe modular programming. In 1975 the Higher Order Language Working Group (HOLWG) was formed with the intent of reducing this number by finding or creating a programming language generally suitable for the department's requirements; the result was Ada. The total number of high-level programming languages in use for such projects fell from over 450 in 1983 to 37 by 1996.

Template:Wikisourcepar The working group created a series of language requirements documents—the Strawman, Woodenman, Tinman, Ironman and Steelman documents. Many existing languages were formally reviewed, but the team concluded in 1977 that no existing language met the specifications.

Requests for proposals for a new programming language were issued and four contractors were hired to develop their proposals under the names of Red (Intermetrics led by Benjamin Brosgol), Green (CII Honeywell Bull, led by Jean Ichbiah), Blue (SofTech, led by John Goodenough), and Yellow (SRI International, led by Jay Spitzen ). In April 1978, after public scrutiny, the Red and Green proposals passed to the next phase. In May of 1979, the Green proposal, designed by Jean Ichbiah at CII Honeywell Bull, was chosen and given the name Ada—after Augusta Ada, Countess of Lovelace. This proposal was influenced by the programming language LIS that Ichbiah and his group had developed in the 1970s. The Military Standard reference manual was approved on December 10, 1980 (Ada Lovelace's birthday).

The US Department of Defense required the use of Ada (the Ada mandate) for every software project where new code was more than 30% of result, though exceptions to this rule were often granted. This requirement was effectively removed in 1997, as the DoD began to embrace COTS technology. Similar requirements existed in other North Atlantic Treaty Organisation countries.

The language became an ANSI standard in 1983 (ANSI/MIL-STD 1815 (http://archive.adaic.com/standards/83lrm/html/Welcome.html) —1815 is Ada Lovelace's birthyear), and an ISO standard in 1987 (ISO-8652:1987). This version of the language is commonly known as Ada 83, from the date of its adoption by ANSI.

Ada 95, the joint ISO/ANSI standard (ISO-8652:1995 (http://www.adaic.org/standards/95lrm/html/RM-TTL.html)) is the latest standard for Ada. It was accepted in February 1995 (making Ada 95 the first ISO standard object-oriented programming language). To help with the standard revision and future acceptance, the US Air Force funded the development of the GNAT Compiler. Nowadays the GNAT Compiler is part of the GNU Compiler Collection.

Work continues on improving and updating the technical content of the Ada programming language. A Technical Corrigendum to Ada 95 was published in October 2001. Presently, more work is being done to produce an Addendum to Ada 95 expected in late 2005 or early 2006.

"Hello, world!" in Ada

A common example of a language's syntax is the Hello world program. There are shortcuts available for Ada.Text_IO.Put_Line, needing less typing, however they are not used here for better understanding. For a detailed explanation see wikibooks:Programming:Ada:Basic.

with Ada.Text_IO; 

procedure Hello is
begin
   Ada.Text_IO.Put_Line("Hello, world!");
end Hello;

The Ariane 5 failure

A commonly encountered myth blames the loss of a European Space Agency Ariane 5 rocket on a bug in an Ada program or on disabling Ada's runtime checks. For the Ariane 4 it had been proven that those runtime checks weren't needed. Although range checks and appropriate exception handlers on all type conversions might have trapped the problem, the problem itself was a design decision to reuse a part and its software from the Ariane 4 rocket without adequate analysis of its suitability or tests on Ariane 5 data.

See also: Ariane 5 Flight 501

See also

Online tutorials

Ada has always been a very open language, and there are many online tutorials available. The following sites have link collections to Ada tutorials

• Wikibook tutorial for programing in Ada
• at Adahome (http://www.adahome.com/Tutorials)
• at adaworld (http://www.adaworld.com/tutorialsmain.html)
• at Computer-Books.us (http://www.computer-books.us/ada95.php)

Organizations

• Ada Information Clearinghouse
• SIGAda - ACM Special Interest Group on Ada

Compilers

• GNAT - Free compiler based on GCC
• JGNAT - GNAT-based compiler for the Java Runtime Environment
• MGNAT - GNAT-based compiler for the Microsoft .NET Environment (A# project)
• ObjectAda

Tools

• Aunit
• GNAT Programming System (GPS)
• GNAVI (Ada Visual RAD)
• GtkAda
• PolyORB
• XML/Ada and XML4Ada95

Related programming languages

• SPARK - High integrity language based on an Ada subset
• VHDL

Related topics

• High Integrity Systems
• Ravenscar profile

References

International Standards

• ISO/IEC 8652: Information technology — Programming languages — Ada
• ISO/IEC 15291: Information technology — Programming languages — Ada Semantic Interface Specification (ASIS)
• ISO/IEC 18009: Information technology — Programming languages — Ada: Conformity assessment of a language processor (ACATS)
• IEEE Standard 1003.5b-1996, the POSIX Ada binding
• Ada Language Mapping Specification (http://www.omg.org/technology/documents/formal/ada_language_mapping.htm), the CORBA IDL to Ada mapping

Books

Template:Wikibookspar

• Jan Skansholm: Ada 95 From the Beginning, Addison-Wesley, ISBN 0-201-40376-5
• John Barnes: Programming in Ada plus Language Reference Manual, Addison-Wesley, ISBN 0-201-56539-0
• John Barnes: Programming in Ada 95, Addison-Wesley, ISBN 0-201-34293-6
• John Barnes: High Integrity Ada: The SPARK Approach, Addison-Wesley, ISBN 0201175177
• John Barnes: High Integrity Software: The SPARK Approach to Safety and Security, Addison-Wesley, ISBN 0-321-13616-0
• Dean W. Gonzalez: Ada Programmer's Handbook, Benjamin-Cummings Publishing Company, ISBN 0805325298
• M. Ben-Ari: Ada for Software Engineers, John Wiley & Sons, ISBN 0-471-97912-0
• Norman Cohen: Ada as a Second Language, McGraw-Hill Science/Engineering/Math, ISBN 0-0-7011607-5
• Alan Burns, Andy Wellings: Real-Time Systems and Programming Languages. Ada 95, Real-Time Java and Real-Time POSIX., Addison-Wesley, ISBN 0-201-72988-1
• Alan Burns, Andy Wellings: Concurrency in Ada, Cambridge University Press, ISBN 0-521-62911-X
• Colin Atkinson: Object-Oriented Reuse, Concurrency and Distribution: An Ada-Based Approach, Addison-Wesley, ISBN 0201565277
• Grady Booch, Doug Bryan: Software Engineering with Ada, Addison-Wesley, ISBN 0805306080
• Daniel Stubbs, Neil W. Webre: Data Structures with Abstract Data Types and Ada, Brooks Cole, ISBN 0-534-14448-9
• Pascal Ledru: Distributed Programming in Ada with Protected Objects, Dissertation.com, ISBN 1-58112-034-6
• Fintan Culwin: Ada, a Developmental Approach, Prentice Hall, ISBN 0132646803
• John English, Fintan Culwin: Ada 95 the Craft of Object Oriented Programming, Prentice Hall, ISBN 0-1-3230350-7
• David A. Wheeler: Ada 95, Springer-Verlag, ISBN 0-387-94801-5
• David R. Musser, Alexander Stepanov: The Ada Generic Library: Linear List Processing Packages, Springer-Verlag, ISBN 0387971335
• Michael B. Feldman: Software Construction and Data Structures with Ada 95, Addison-Wesley, ISBN 0201887959
• Simon Johnston: Ada95 for C and C++ Programmers, Addison-Wesley, ISBN 0201403633
• Michael B. Feldman, Elliot B. Koffman: Ada 95, Addison-Wesley, ISBN 0-201-36123-X
• Nell Dale, Chip Weems, John McCormick: Programming and Problem Solving with Ada 95, Jones & Bartlett Publishers, ISBN 0763702935
• Nell Dale, Susan Lilly, John McCormick: Ada Plus Data Structures: An Object-Based Approach, Jones & Bartlett Publishers, ISBN 0669416762
• Bruce C. Krell: Developing With Ada: Life-Cycle Methods, Bantam Dell Pub Group, ISBN 0553091026
• Judy Bishop: Distributed Ada: Developments and Experiences, Cambridge University Press, ISBN 0-521-39251-9
• Bo Sanden: Software Systems Construction With Examples in Ada, Prentice Hall, ISBN 013030834X
• Bruce Hillam: Introduction to Abstract Data Types Using Ada, Prentice Hall, ISBN 0130459496
• David Rudd: Introduction to Software Design and Development With Ada, Brooks Cole, ISBN 0314028293
• Ian C. Pyle: Developing Safety Systems: A Guide Using Ada, Prentice Hall, ISBN 0132042983
• Louis Baker: Artificial Intelligence With Ada, McGraw-Hill, ISBN 0070033501
• Alan Burns, Andy Wellings: HRT-HOOD: A Structured Design Method for Hard Real-Time Ada Systems, North-Holland, ISBN 0444821643
• Walter Savitch, Charles Peterson: Ada: An Introduction to the Art and Science of Programming, Benjamin-Cummings Publishing Company, ISBN 0805370706
• Mark Allen Weiss: Data Structures and Algorithm Analysis in Ada, Benjamin-Cummings Publishing Company, ISBN 0805390553

External links

• Ada World (http://adaworld.com/)
• AdaPower (http://adapower.com/)
• ACM SIGAda (http://www.sigada.org/)
• Ada-Europe Organization (http://www.ada-europe.org/)
• Ada Information Clearinghouse (http://www.adaic.com/)
• ISO Home of Ada Standards (http://www.open-std.org/jtc1/sc22/wg9/)
• Ada 95 Books Available Online (http://www.computer-books.us/ada95.php)
• Ada Rapporteur Group (evolution of standard) (http://www.ada-auth.org/)
• Ada Answers - Building better software with Ada (http://www.ada-answers.com/)
• Ada Academic Initiative (http://www.adacore.com/academic.php)
• "Libre" Ada Software (http://libre.adacore.com/)
• GNU Ada Homepage (http://www.gnuada.org/)
• GNAVI Ada Visual RAD (http://www.gnavi.org/)
• Citations from CiteSeer (http://citeseer.org/cs?q=%22Ada%22)
• GNAT (http://www.gnat.com/)
• Forum (news:comp.lang.ada)
• Ada Tutorial (http://oopweb.com/Ada/Documents/Lovelace/Volume.html)
• Projects Using Ada (http://www.seas.gwu.edu/~mfeldman/ada-project-summary.html)
• A#: Ada on .NET (http://www.martincarlisle.com/a_sharp.html)
• Conference announcements for the international Ada community (http://www.cs.kuleuven.ac.be/~dirk/ada-belgium/events/)

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