Ada

                                     

Ada is modern programming language designed for large, long-lived applications – and embedded systems in particular – where reliability and efficiency are essential. It was originally developed in the early 1980s by a team led by Dr. Jean Ichbiah at Cll-Honeywell-Bull in France.

The name "Ada" was chosen in honor of Augusta Ada Lovelace (1815-1852), a mathematician who is sometimes regarded as the world's first programmer because of her work with Charles Babbage. She was also the daughter of the poet Lord Byron.

Ada contains features commonly found in other programming languages and provides additional support for modern programming practices, for controlling special purpose hardware to meet real-time deadlines, and for the creation and enhancement of large and complex programs by groups of programmers over long periods of time.

Features of Ada...

• Portability
• Modularity
• Reusability
• Reliability
• Maintainability
• Scalar Ranges – allows the programmer to simply and explicitly specify the range of values that are permitted for variables of scalar types
• Programming in the Large – the original Ada 83 design introduced the package construct, a feature that supports encapsulation and modularization,  and that allows the developer to control the namespace that is accessible within a given compilation unit
• Object Oriented Programming – allows the partitioning of a system into modules corresponding to abstract data types or abstract objects
• Concurrent Programming – Ada supplies a structured, high-level facility for concurrency. The unit of concurrency is a program entity known as a “task” – tasks can communicate implicitly via shared data or explicitly via a synchronous control mechanism known as the rendezvous
• Systems Programming – Ada supplies the necessary features to allow the programmer to get close to the hardware

Ada Applications…

• Payroll systems, commercial banking systems, stock quotation transaction system
• Geophysical exploration and data processing systems
• NASA’s Space Shuttle and Space Station Environments
• Real-time continuous medical monitoring systems and real-time embedded control of copier and duplicator products
• Strategic military embedded systems, the majority of which are used in real-time applications, systems and mission trainers

Quotes about Ada…

“When Roman engineers built a bridge, they had to stand under it while the first legion marched across. If programmers today worked under similar ground rules, they might as well find themselves getting much more interested in Ada.”

- Robert Dewar, President of Ada Core Technologies

“Q: If anyone knows of a book that is the functional equivalent of ‘The Idiot’s Guide to C’ for the Ada Language, please send me the title and the author. A: Idiots don’t use Ada. Idiots only use C or derivations.”

- David Weller

“Really good C Programmers are just as scarce as Ada programmers. I know of one really good C programmer who is now an Ada Programmer. His reasons for switching to Ada are largely the same reasons that made him really good in the first place.”

- Peter C. Chapin

“Ada is a very good language for expressing design. It also happens to be executable.”

- Stephen Leake

“I would describe Ada as an industrial strength implementation of the ideas in Pascal, Modula 2 and CLU, with a strong guiding philosophy but enough pragmatics to make implementations practical and efficient.”

- Niklas Holsti

“With Ada, we are not trying to appeal to the programmer. Rather, we are concerned with good engineering practice. Ada continues to be the best language available when one is focused on engineering rather than programming.”

- Richard Riehle

Comments…

"The Ada Programming Language is very similar to C. It is simple and readable. It prefers the English language in some of their basic operations. It is easy to learn and understand."

- Karizza Crespo (T-7L)

"Ada Programming Language provides a consistent syntax for performing basic operations which does not allow other symbols. It is also significant in concurrency programming and it ensures safety and security of large applications."

- Kathleen Balquin (T-7L)

"When you are a C programmer, it is somehow easy to understand and appreciate the ADA Programming Language. It is object oriented and implements concurrency which are both very important in programming languages nowadays. Its syntax is simple and easy to relate to, thus making it quite readable.I believe its applications are very significant especially in the field of engineering and technology."

-Jannah Tierra (T-7L)

"Structured, parang C pero lately inupgrade sa OOP; Parang Pascal ang array;

May associative array na parang PHP. It's a mixture of this and that from many languages."

- Sir Rommel Bulalacao (ICS Instructor)

Print Hello World in Ada…

with Ada.Text_IO; use Ada.Text_IO;

procedure Hello is

begin

  Put_Line ("Hello, world!");

end Hello;

Sources…

• http://www.adacore.com/adaanswers/about/ada/
• http://people.cs.kuleuven.be/~dirk/ada-belgium/ada.html
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ada_(programming_language)
• http://people.cs.kuleuven.be/~dirk/quotes.html

Group Members

Zhar Altea 2010-02864
Cherry Mae Aran 2009-15460
Kathleen Balquin 2010-41958
Karizza Crespo 2010-00094
Jannah Tierra 2010-01711