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Ada (programming language)

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Ada is a strongly typed programming language created by Cii Honeywell Bull and led by Jean Ichbiah for the US Department of Defense. It is similar to traditional structured programming languages and adds several object based concepts.

Ada was named after Lady Ada Lovelace.

In 1975 the Higher Order Language Working Group (HOLWG) was formed for the purpose of finding or creating a programming language for use in the Department of Defense. After creating the Strawman, Tinman, and Ironman (and later the Steelman) language requirements, it was concluded in 1977 that none of the popular existing languages 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 Green, Red, Blue, and Yellow. In May of 1979, the Green proposal was chosen and given the name Ada. The reference manual was approved on December 10, 1980 (Ada Lovelace's birthday). Ada95, the joint ISO/ANSI standard and the latest standard regarding Ada, was accepted in February 1995.

US Department of Defense required using Ada for every software project where new code was more than 30% of result. So more Ada code was written at DoD than anywhere else. Recently this requirement was removed, and only small percent of new code at DoD is written in Ada.

Ada protects programs against almost all segfault, buffer overflow, off-by-one and other silly bugs, therefore is very widely used in critical systems like avionics, weapons or spacecraft. But almost doesn't mean that it will protect against all such bugs. One very expensive European Space Agency's Ariane 5 rocket was lost due to arithmetic overflow in an Ada program. See full report here

What about

  • how Ada tied into formal specification languages?
  • how Ada is very stongly typed
  • packages in Ada
  • concurrency support
  • real time/embedded system support ???
  • how Ada suffered from design by DOC committee/specifications and required super-fast hardware for compilation/debugging.
  • ?? others

Versions lost in moving to proper title.

/Talk

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