The Ada programming language effort, more than 32 years old, was born as a response to the need for highly reliable tools for building safe and robust mission-critical, embedded real-time, concurrent and distributed systems. As an industrial-strength language Ada should be the language of choice for creating reliable and secure software systems. Writing these complex artifacts is simply much easier to do in this language. Ada is also the first OOP language (technically, Ada83 was not a full blown OOP language, but object-based), and probably the only one, accepted as an international ISO standard, with a rigorous validation process for its compilers. Numerous language processing and support tools for virtually any kind of hardware/software combinations are available. As a serious, international standard, Ada cannot be changed very often, but usually in ten-year cycles. The first international standard was released in 1983 (ISO STD 1815A); this was followed by Ada95, while the newest version is now known as Ada 2005. The latter is the focus of this talk.
This talk provides a brief overview of the major linguistic concepts and unique features of the Ada programming language in general - which incidentally, have remained fundamentally the same since its inception, and Ada 2005 in particular; at the same time, we present the inevitable comparisons to other popular programming languages. Indeed, Ada's advanced concepts have served as inspiration to recent, more popular languages, and interestingly enough, later versions of Ada have also benefited by these languages' more dynamic developments.
(Note: To appreciate the more subtle points of the presentation, a good understanding of the Ada language design is desirable.)
Slides in pdf.
Colloquia Series page.