We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 July 2014
Programming Languages and Software practice are always engaged in a game of leapfrog: a forward looking programming language introduces new ways of thinking about software development, and its constructs shape the way programmers think about their craft; creative programmers invent new idioms and patterns to tackle ever more complex programming tasks, and these idioms become incorporated in the next generation of programming languages.
The latest version of Ada, whose description we owe once again to the inimitable expository talents of John Barnes, has exemplified this dynamic repeatedly over the last 30 years.
Ada 83 showed programmers how programming in the large should be organized (packages, strong typing, privacy) and convinced them that indices out of range were not a common pitfall of programming but elementary errors that could be controlled with proper declarations and constraint checking. Ada 83 also put concurrent programming in a mainstream programming language.
Ada 95 benefited from a decade-long development in object-oriented programming techniques, and successfully grafted the ideas of polymorphism and dynamic dispatching onto a strongly-typed language with concurrency. It enhanced programming-in-the large capabilities with child units and their generic incarnations.
Ada 2005 showed how data-based synchronization (protected types) and concurrency (task types) could be unified through a novel use of interface inheritance, and adopted a conservative model of multiple inheritance of interfaces that has proved more robust than the more unrestricted models of MI.
To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.
Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.
Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.
To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.
To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.
