Summary
Ada 2012 is a comprehensive high level programming language especially suited for the professional development of large or critical programs for which correctness and robustness are major considerations. In this introductory chapter we briefly trace the development of Ada 2012 (and its predecessors Ada 83, Ada 95, and Ada 2005), its place in the overall language scene and the general structure of the remainder of this book.
Standard development
Ada 2012 is a direct descendant of Ada 83 which was originally sponsored by the US Department of Defense for use in the so-called embedded system application area. (An embedded system is one in which the computer is an integral part of a larger system such as a chemical plant, missile or dishwasher.)
The story of Ada goes back to about 1974 when the United States Department of Defense realized that it was spending far too much on software, especially in the embedded systems area. To cut a long story short the DoD sponsored the new language through a number of phases of definition of requirements, competitive and parallel development and evaluation which culminated in the issue of the ANSI standard for Ada in 19831. The team that developed Ada was based at CII Honeywell Bull in France under the leadership of Jean D Ichbiah.
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- Information
- Programming in Ada 2012 , pp. 3 - 10Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2014