Ada Resource Association

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. (Note: article is now behind a pay wall.)

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.

In November of 2007, the National Museum of Computing sponsored an historical code-breaking competition to celebrate the rebuild of Colossus Mark 2 at Bletchley Park. Colossus, the first programmable digital computer, was used in WWII to crack the codes created by the Lorenz cipher machines used by the German High Command. Programmers and code breakers were invited to try to beat the rebuilt Colossus in cracking the 1938 Lorenz SZ42 encrypted message.

Using Ada, IT security specialist, Joachim Schüth, was able to decipher the code and beat Colossus. In the following interview, Joachim explains why he started working with Ada, his impressions of the language, and why it was the perfect choice for the challenge.

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 this article by David Norfolk and Pan Pantziarka, the authors look at the increasing use of Formal Methods and the Correctness by Construction process championed by Altran Praxis.

Crosstalk devotes its August 2006 issue to Ada 2005. This issue contains 5 Ada 2005 articles by numerous authors.

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).

GCN (Government Computer News) interviews S. Tucker Taft, who led the Ada 9X language design team from 1990 to 1995, is now president of the Ada Resource Association, organized last year to maintain the language standard after the Defense Department closed the Ada Joint Program Office.