Summary
Welcome to Programming in Ada 2012 which has been triggered by the recent ISO standardization of Ada 2012.
The original language, devised in the 1980s, is known as Ada 83 and was followed by Ada 95, Ada 2005, and now Ada 2012. Ada has gained a reputation as being the language of choice when software needs to be correct. And as software pervades into more areas of society so that ever more software is safety critical or security critical, it is clear that the future for Ada is bright. One observes, for example, the growth in use of Spark, the Ada based high integrity language widely used in areas such as avionics and signalling.
Ada 83 was a relatively simple but highly reliable language with emphasis on abstraction and information hiding. It was also notable for being perhaps the first practical language to include multitasking within the language itself.
Ada 95 added extra flexibility to the strongly typed and secure foundation provided by the Software Engineering approach of Ada 83. In particular it added the full dynamic features of Object Oriented Programming (OOP) and in fact was the first such language to become an ISO standard. Ada 95 also made important structural enhancements to visibility control by the addition of child units, it greatly improved multitasking by the addition of protected types, and added important basic material to the standard library.
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- Programming in Ada 2012 , pp. xix - xxiiPublisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2014