Tutorial on Ada

Abstract

Ada is a general purpose language that was developed to meet the needs ofsoftware development within the U.S. Department of Defense. By the end of the 1980's, it is expected that the majority of software developed for mission-critical systems will be written in Ada. With the recent standardization of Ada by ANSI, there has been a considerable interest in the language both in the United States and abroad. Ada is an extremely well-designed language and incorporates many important ideas in software methodology. These include: •abstract data types •information hiding •concurrent processing •re-usable software components This tutorial is designed to introduce the main features of Ada. Using a simple problem as a background case study, the tutorial will cover: •Ada types •classical programming constructs •packages, exceptions and generics •tasks