Ada Resource Association

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.