Ada Resource Association

After five years, RTCA and EUROCAE, the U.S. and European avionics standards organizations, are nearing the finish line in updating DO-178B, the bible for developers of safety-critical software. A cast of 1,000-plus people have observed or participated in the process and about 100 people show up at every meeting, according to one member of RTCA Special Committee 205 (SC-205). The industry expects the final package — DO-178C — to be released in the first quarter of 2011 and be mandated six to nine months after ratification.

The ease with which code is analyzable depends of the language type you use. Static analysis is becoming mainstream, with mature bug-finding tools for C and Java, including products such as Coverity Prevent, Grammatech CodeSonar, and Fortify SCA. These products limit the level of “noise” (false warnings) inherent to such tools to a minimum. However, by carefully selecting those cases for which they report a problem, these bug-finders hide the fact that they are largely uncertain about the overall correctness of the program.

Static analysis tools are becoming more integrated into the software development process. Saving data from the compiler, change history, and error information during the process instead of as a post-code step can make static analysis more productive.

Jack Ganssle at Embedded.com discusses the Sofcheck and AdaCore CodePeer tool in Executing software contracts; in particular he examines the tool’s ability to create contracts for subprograms.

Jack Ganssle at Embedded.com wonders Why aren’t developers more interested in Ada?

A follow-up piece by Jack Ganssle from his original article on the adoption of Ada which appears on Embedded.com.

Naomi Hamilton at TechWorld chats with S. Tucker Taft, Chairman and CTO of SofCheck. Taft has been heavily involved in the Ada 1995 and 2005 revisions, and still works with the language today as both a designer and user.

Ada95 is a standardized object-oriented programming language that was developed in the late 1970s by the U.S. Department of Defense. Today, engineers like Daniel Ramirez use the highly structured language to increase the safety and reliability of their new robotics applications.

The recent introduction of multicore architectures has caused a surprising amount of uproar. Multiprocessing has been around for decades. The original CDC 6000, for instance, was an interestingly designed multiprocessor machine first put into use in the early 1960s.

Another important player in multiprocessing is Ada. Even the original Ada 83 version of the language has a well-developed notion of multithreading (termed “tasking” in Ada) with high-level constructs that are easy to use and analyze. The subsequent Ada 95 and Ada 2005 versions of the language substantially improved and extended this functionality, and decades of experience have been accumulated in using Ada to deal with the problem of writing programs that run effectively on machines using more than one processor.

The choice of programming languages is one of the most critical decisions in any programming project. And there’s no shortage of choices. In the 60-year history of computer programming, hundreds of different languages have been designed and used for various purposes.