Ada Resource Association

William Wong looks at the Dasher project being developed by Mälardalen University in Sweden.

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

Joab Jackson takes a look at the history of the Ada programming language, it’s traditional markets, and gives a real picture of Ada’s place in today’s software development world.

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.

Richard Goering looks at the place Ada has in the embedded marketplace.

Developing an embedded system is hard work. Reliability is essential; indeed, embedded software may control a safety- or security-critical system where an error can have catastrophic consequences. New requirements will almost surely pop up, so the software must be maintain- able. Real-time constraints and memory limitations make time and space predictability and run-time performance important.

In a 2002 survey by the independent market research firm VDC, embedded Ada developers named the language’s ability to find bugs in compile time as its major benefit. Its nature as an ISO standard and object oriented language were Ada’s next important advantages. Almost half of those surveyed believe that Ada reduces a project’s costs. VDC’s results are available in the .pdf file Ada in Embedded Systems (five pages).