Ada Resource Association

Language revision adds contract-based programming, multicore support, and other advanced features

GENEVA, Switzerland, December 18, 2012 – The Ada Resource Association (ARA) and Ada-Europe today announced the approval and publication of the latest version of the Ada programming language by the Geneva-based International Organization for Standardization (ISO). The language revision, known as Ada 2012, was under the auspices of ISO/IEC JTC1/SC22/WG9 and was conducted by the Ada Rapporteur Group (ARG) subunit of WG9, with sponsorship in part from the ARA and Ada-Europe. The formal approval of the standard was issued on November 20 by ISO/IEC JTC 1, and the standard was published on December 15.

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A new GNAT Pro feature allows Ada developers to portably and reliably define data layout in an endianness-independent fashion. This capability makes it possible to port and reuse existing code bases on a different hardware platform, without having to manually implement the error-prone, byte-swapping logic that would otherwise be needed.

Rockwell Collins has successfully used AdaCore’s Code Traceability Analysis for DO-178B in the certification of the Integrated Display System (IDS) for a large, next-generation, commercial aircraft. The Traceability Analysis package is part of the evidence needed to satisfy the DO-178B objectives for structural code coverage at Level A, the highest (most stringent) level for avionics software safety.

The SPARK Pro 11 software development and verification environment has been released, providing a major step forward for the developers of high-assurance systems. SPARK Pro 11 offers many enhancements particularly in the area of program proof.

GNATProve is used for formal verification of Ada programs and is being developed as part of the Hi-Lite project. It can prove that subprograms respect their contracts, expressed as preconditions and postconditions in the syntax of Ada 2012. The tool automatically discovers the subset of subprograms which can be formally analyzed. We provide binary distributions for x86 linux, x86 windows and x86-64 bit linux. More details can be found at http://www.open-do.org/projects/hi-lite/gnatprove/