Ada Resource Association

The first update to Ada 2012, a Technical Corrigendum, has completed the standardization process and has been published by ISO. The new document, ISO/IEC 8652:2012/Cor 1:2016, consists of corrections to the Ada 2012 Standard. Some of the corrections include minor new features, such as raise expressions, and aspects Predicate_Failure and Exclusive_Functions. Since the Corrigendum is purely a correction document, its publication does not create a new Ada version; Ada 2012 is modified to include these changes.

Currie Colket, a long-time advocate of Ada, passed away on December 23rd. Currie was best known for his work on ASIS, leading to the ISO standardization of ASIS. One of the original Ada proponents, in the 1980s he served as the Navy Deputy to the Ada Joint Program Office. He was extremely active in the Ada community for many years. (Thanks to SIGAda and especially David Cook for providing this summary of Currie’s career.)

This Thursday, December 10th, marks the 200th birthday of Ada Byron Lovelace, for whom the Ada programming language is named. AdaCore has created a timeline of her life at celebratingada.com.

There are a number of events going on all over the world to mark this anniversary and celebrate her pioneering work in what became computing. We’re not going to try to list what are inherently local events, but you may want to check your local school of computing if they have or know of any local events.

We’ve update our home page to better reflect our mission. Our old home page over-emphasized Ada news and said nothing about the many resources that we have for users of the Ada programming language (including existing, new, and potential users). The highlighted resources will be changed periodically to show different facets of our site.

The new home page has a simplified version of the Ada news feed on the left side. If, however, you prefer the old, more detailed news feed, it can be found on the news page.

As always, free free to send us feedback on the new home page or anything else via our contact page.

I’ve been reminded that the Philae comet probe that landed today (see http://www.cnn.com/2014/11/12/world/comet-landing-countdown/index.html), and its mothership, Rosetta, run software that was developed in Ada using the HOOD methodology. This is another great success for Ada spacecraft software. There is a bit about the software choices in the paper found at http://adsabs.harvard.edu/full/1997ESASP.409..133D.

“Programming in Ada 2012” by John Barnes is now available. This is the first book that we’re aware of that specifically covers Ada 2012. “Programming in Ada 2012” is an update of John’s previous book, “Programming in Ada 2005”, which was an update of “Programming in Ada 95”, which was an update of “Programming in Ada”. What we can tell from this (besides the fact that John has been involved in Ada since the beginning) is that this is a useful and widely used book (of ever expanding size!) that has withstood the test of time. We expect that this new edition will be the same.

The book can be ordered at Amazon and presumably other booksellers. It also can be ordered directly from the publisher.

Ada (the woman) was born on this date in 1815.

Ada (the language) was born on this date in 1980.

Ada 2012, the latest update of the language, was born on this date last year.

Thanks to Jeff Carter for the reminder.

Based on a discussion on comp.lang.ada, we’ve created a new category on our “Learning Materials” for social media sites, and added links to the Ada groups on a number of them:

• Stackoverflow – Questions and answers for programmers
• Google+ – Ada Programming Community
• LinkedIn – Ada Group

All of these provide places to get help and information about Ada from other Ada users. We also added Planet Ada, a news and information site, to the website listings. These join the Reddit and Wikibooks sites, along with the old stand-by of the comp.lang.ada newsgroup, as places to go for Ada information.