What is Ada?

Ada

From Section 1 of Ada 95 Language Reference Manual:

Ada is a programming language designed to support the construction of long-lived, highly reliable software systems. The language includes facilities to define packages of related types, objects, and operations. The packages may be parameterized and the types may be extended to support the construction of libraries of reusable, adaptable software components. The operations may be implemented as subprograms using conventional sequential control structures, or as entries that include synchronization of concurrent threads of control as part of their invocation. The language treats modularity in the physical sense as well, with a facility to support separate compilation.

The language includes a complete facility for the support of real-time, concurrent programming. Errors can be signaled as exceptions and handled explicitly. The language also covers systems programming; this requires precise control over the representation of data and access to system-dependent properties. Finally, a predefined environment of standard packages is provided, including facilities for, among others, input-output, string manipulation, numeric elementary functions, and random number generation.

From the Preface of the Ada 95 Rationale:

Modern society is becoming very dependent upon software. Our transport systems, financial systems, medical systems and defense systems all depend to a very large degree upon software. As a consequence the safety of many human lives and much property now depends upon the reliable functioning of software. Moreover, the fall in the cost of hardware has now made possible the development of large software systems.

Ada is a programming language of special value in the development of large programs which must work reliably. This applies to most defense applications (from which background Ada evolved) and extends to many application domains. Indeed over half the Ada programs now being developed are for non-defense applications.

This document describes the rationale for Ada 9X, the proposed revised standard. Ada 9X increases the flexibility of Ada thus making it applicable to wider domains but retains the inherent reliability for which Ada has become noted. Important aspects of Ada 9X include:

Object Oriented Programming. Ada 9X includes full OOP facilities giving the flexibility of programming by extension which enables programs to be extended and maintained at lower cost. Hierarchical Libraries. The library mechanism now takes a hierarchical form which is valuable for the control and decomposition of large programs. Protected Objects. The tasking features of Ada are enhanced to incorporate a very efficient mechanism for multitask synchronized access to shared data. This is of special value for hard realtime systems.

These enhancements to Ada make Ada 9X an outstanding language. It adds the flexibility of languages such as C++ to the reliable Software Engineering framework provided and proven by Ada 83 over the past ten years.

Ada 9X is a natural evolution of Ada 83. The enhancements have been made without disturbing the existing investment in Ada 83 programs and programmers. Upward compatibility has been a prime goal and has been achieved within the constraints imposed by other requirements.

This document is in several parts. The first part is an Introduction to Ada 9X; it presents a general discussion of the scope and objectives of Ada 9X and its major technical features. The second part contains a more detailed chapter by chapter account of the Core language. The third part covers the various Annexes which address the predefined environment and the needs of specialized application areas. Finally there are two appendices; Appendix A addresses the issue of upward compatibility with Ada 83 and shows that for normal programs the goal of compatibility has been achieved; Appendix B summarizes the few changes since the Committee Draft. This document will be of special value to program managers, team leaders and all software professionals with concern for the organized development of software.

Ada 9X deserves the attention of all members of the computing profession. It is a coherent and reliable foundation vehicle for developing the major applications of the next decade.

The Ada 9X Mapping/Revision Team,
June 1994.

From the Introduction of the Ada 95 Language Reference Manual:

Design Goals

6 Ada was originally designed with three overriding concerns: program reliability and maintenance, programming as a human activity, and efficiency. This revision to the language was designed to provide greater flexibility and extensibility, additional control over storage management and synchroniza- tion, and standardized packages oriented toward supporting important application areas, while at the same time retaining the original emphasis on reliability, maintainability, and efficiency.

7 The need for languages that promote reliability and simplify maintenance is well established. Hence emphasis was placed on program readability over ease of writing. For example, the rules of the language require that program variables be explicitly declared and that their type be specified. Since the type of a variable is invariant, compilers can ensure that operations on variables are compatible with the properties intended for objects of the type. Furthermore, error-prone notations have been avoided, and the syntax of the language avoids the use of encoded forms in favor of more English-like constructs. Finally, the language offers support for separate compilation of program units in a way that facilitates program development and maintenance, and which provides the same degree of checking between units as within a unit.

8 Concern for the human programmer was also stressed during the design. Above all, an attempt was made to keep to a relatively small number of underlying concepts integrated in a consistent and systematic way while continuing to avoid the pitfalls of excessive involution. The design especially aims to provide language constructs that correspond intuitively to the normal expectations of users.

9 Like many other human activities, the development of programs is becoming ever more decentralized and distributed. Consequently, the ability to assemble a program from independently produced software components continues to be a central idea in the design. The concepts of packages, of private types, and of generic units are directly related to this idea, which has ramifications in many other aspects of the language. An allied concern is the maintenance of programs to match changing requirements; type extension and the hierarchical library enable a program to be modified while minimizing disturbance to existing tested and trusted components.

10 No language can avoid the problem of efficiency. Languages that require over-elaborate compilers, or that lead to the inefficient use of storage or execution time, force these inefficiencies on all machines and on all programs. Every construct of the language was examined in the light of present implementation techniques. Any proposed construct whose implementation was unclear or that required excessive machine resources was rejected.

Language Summary

11 An Ada program is composed of one or more program units. Program units may be subprograms (which define executable algorithms), packages (which define collections of entities), task units (which define concurrent computations), protected units (which define operations for the coordinated sharing of data between tasks), or generic units (which define parameterized forms of packages and subprograms). Each program unit normally consists of two parts: a specification, containing the information that must be visible to other units, and a body, containing the implementation details, which need not be visible to other units. Most program units can be compiled separately.

12 This distinction of the specification and body, and the ability to compile units separately, allows a program to be designed, written, and tested as a set of largely independent software components.

13 An Ada program will normally make use of a library of program units of general utility. The language provides means whereby individual organizations can construct their own libraries. All libraries are structured in a hierarchical manner; this enables the logical decomposition of a subsystem into individual components. The text of a separately compiled program unit must name the library units it requires.

14 Program Units

15 A subprogram is the basic unit for expressing an algorithm. There are two kinds of subprograms: procedures and functions. A procedure is the means of invoking a series of actions. For example, it may read data, update variables, or produce some output. It may have parameters, to provide a controlled means of passing information between the procedure and the point of call. A function is the means of invoking the computation of a value. It is similar to a procedure, but in addition will return a result.

16 A package is the basic unit for defining a collection of logically related entities. For example, a package can be used to define a set of type declarations and associated operations. Portions of a package can be hidden from the user, thus allowing access only to the logical properties expressed by the package specification.

17 Subprogram and package units may be compiled separately and arranged in hierarchies of parent and child units giving fine control over visibility of the logical properties and their detailed implementation.

18 A task unit is the basic unit for defining a task whose sequence of actions may be executed concurrently with those of other tasks. Such tasks may be implemented on multicomputers, multiprocessors, or with interleaved execution on a single processor. A task unit may define either a single executing task or a task type permitting the creation of any number of similar tasks.

19 A protected unit is the basic unit for defining protected operations for the coordinated use of data shared between tasks. Simple mutual exclusion is provided automatically, and more elaborate sharing protocols can be defined. A protected operation can either be a subprogram or an entry. A protected entry specifies a Boolean expression (an entry barrier) that must be true before the body of the entry is executed. A protected unit may define a single protected object or a protected type permitting the creation of several similar objects.

20 Declarations and Statements

21 The body of a program unit generally contains two parts: a declarative part, which defines the logical entities to be used in the program unit, and a sequence of statements, which defines the execution of the program unit.

22 The declarative part associates names with declared entities. For example, a name may denote a type, a constant, a variable, or an exception. A declarative part also introduces the names and parameters of other nested subprograms, packages, task units, protected units, and generic units to be used in the program unit.

23 The sequence of statements describes a sequence of actions that are to be performed. The statements are executed in succession (unless a transfer of control causes execution to continue from another place).

24 An assignment statement changes the value of a variable. A procedure call invokes execution of a procedure after associating any actual parameters provided at the call with the corresponding formal parameters.

25 Case statements and if statements allow the selection of an enclosed sequence of statements based on the value of an expression or on the value of a condition.

26 The loop statement provides the basic iterative mechanism in the language. A loop statement specifies that a sequence of statements is to be executed repeatedly as directed by an iteration scheme, or until an exit statement is encountered.

27 A block statement comprises a sequence of statements preceded by the declaration of local entities used by the statements.

28 Certain statements are associated with concurrent execution. A delay statement delays the execution of a task for a specified duration or until a specified time. An entry call statement is written as a procedure call statement; it requests an operation on a task or on a protected object, blocking the caller until the operation can be performed. A called task may accept an entry call by executing a corresponding accept statement, which specifies the actions then to be performed as part of the rendezvous with the calling task. An entry call on a protected object is processed when the corresponding entry barrier evaluates to true, whereupon the body of the entry is executed. The requeue statement permits the provision of a service as a number of related activities with preference control. One form of the select statement allows a selective wait for one of several alternative rendezvous. Other forms of the select statement allow conditional or timed entry calls and the asynchronous transfer of control in response to some triggering event.

29 Execution of a program unit may encounter error situations in which normal program execution cannot continue. For example, an arithmetic computation may exceed the maximum allowed value of a number, or an attempt may be made to access an array component by using an incorrect index value. To deal with such error situations, the statements of a program unit can be textually followed by exception handlers that specify the actions to be taken when the error situation arises. Exceptions can be raised explicitly by a raise statement.

30 Data Types

31 Every object in the language has a type, which characterizes a set of values and a set of applicable operations. The main classes of types are elementary types (comprising enumeration, numeric, and access types) and composite types (including array and record types).

32 An enumeration type defines an ordered set of distinct enumeration literals, for example a list of states or an alphabet of characters. The enumeration types Boolean, Character, and Wide_Character are predefined.

33 Numeric types provide a means of performing exact or approximate numerical computations. Exact computations use integer types, which denote sets of consecutive integers. Approximate computations use either fixed point types, with absolute bounds on the error, or floating point types, with relative bounds on the error. The numeric types Integer, Float, and Duration are predefined.

34 Composite types allow definitions of structured objects with related components. The composite types in the language include arrays and records. An array is an object with indexed components of the same type. A record is an object with named components of possibly different types. Task and protected types are also forms of composite types. The array types String and Wide_String are predefined.

35 Record, task, and protected types may have special components called discriminants which parameterize the type. Variant record structures that depend on the values of discriminants can be defined within a record type.

36 Access types allow the construction of linked data structures. A value of an access type represents a reference to an object declared as aliased or to an object created by the evaluation of an allocator. Several variables of an access type may designate the same object, and components of one object may designate the same or other objects. Both the elements in such linked data structures and their relation to other elements can be altered during program execution. Access types also permit references to subprograms to be stored, passed as parameters, and ultimately dereferenced as part of an indirect call.

37 Private types permit restricted views of a type. A private type can be defined in a package so that only the logically necessary properties are made visible to the users of the type. The full structural details that are externally irrelevant are then only available within the package and any child units.

38 From any type a new type may be defined by derivation. A type, together with its derivatives (both direct and indirect) form a derivation class. Class-wide operations may be defined that accept as a parameter an operand of any type in a derivation class. For record and private types, the derivatives may be extensions of the parent type. Types that support these object-oriented capabilities of class-wide operations and type extension must be tagged, so that the specific type of an operand within a derivation class can be identified at run time. When an operation of a tagged type is applied to an operand whose specific type is not known until run time, implicit dispatching is performed based on the tag of the operand.

39 The concept of a type is further refined by the concept of a subtype, whereby a user can constrain the set of allowed values of a type. Subtypes can be used to define subranges of scalar types, arrays with a limited set of index values, and records and private types with particular discriminant values.

40 Other Facilities

41 Representation clauses can be used to specify the mapping between types and features of an underlying machine. For example, the user can specify that objects of a given type must be represented with a given number of bits, or that the components of a record are to be represented using a given storage layout. Other features allow the controlled use of low level, nonportable, or implementation-dependent aspects, including the direct insertion of machine code.

42 The predefined environment of the language provides for input-output and other capabilities (such as string manipulation and random number generation) by means of standard library packages. Input-output is supported for values of user-defined as well as of predefined types. Standard means of representing values in display form are also provided. Other standard library packages are defined in annexes of the standard to support systems with specialized requirements.

43 Finally, the language provides a powerful means of parameterization of program units, called generic program units. The generic parameters can be types and subprograms (as well as objects and packages) and so allow general algorithms and data structures to be defined that are applicable to all types of a given class.

Language Changes

44 This International Standard replaces the first edition of 1987. In this edition, the following major language changes have been incorporated:

45 Support for standard 8-bit and 16-bit character sets. See Section 2, 3.5.2, 3.6.3, A.1, A.3, and A.4. 46 Object-oriented programming with run-time polymorphism. See the discussions of classes, derived types, tagged types, record extensions, and private extensions in clauses 3.4, 3.9, and 7.3. See also the new forms of generic formal parameters that are allowed by 12.5.1, ``Formal Private and Derived Types'' and 12.7, ``Formal Packages''. 47 Access types have been extended to allow an access value to designate a subprogram or an object declared by an object declaration (as opposed to just a heap-allocated object). See 3.10. 48 Efficient data-oriented synchronization is provided via protected types. See Section 9. 49 The library units of a library may be organized into a hierarchy of parent and child units. See Section 10. 50 Additional support has been added for interfacing to other languages. See Annex B. 51 The Specialized Needs Annexes have been added to provide specific support for certain application areas:

52 Annex C, "Systems Programming" 53 Annex D, "Real-Time Systems" 54 Annex E, "Distributed Systems" 55 Annex F, "Information Systems" 56 Annex G, "Numerics" 57 Annex H, "Safety and Security"

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