Ada Programming

Welcome to the Ada Programming tutorial at Wikibooks. This is the

Ada Mascot with slogan.png
first Ada tutorial covering the Ada 2005 and 2012 standards. If you
are a beginner you will learn the latest standard — if you are a
seasoned Ada user you can see what's new.

Current Development Stage for Ada Programming is "". At this

date, there are more than 200 pages in this book, which makes Ada
Programming one of the largest programming wikibooks.[1]

But still there is always room for improvement — do help us to

expand Ada Programming. Even beginners will find areas to
participate.

About Ada
Ada is a programming language suitable for all development needs.
It has built-in features that directly support structured, object-
oriented, generic, distributed and concurrent programming.

Ada is a good choice for Rapid Application Development, Extreme

Programming (XP), and Free Software development.

Ada is named after Augusta Ada King-Noel, Countess of Lovelace.

Programming in the large

Ada puts unique emphasis on, and provides strong support for, good
software engineering practices that scale well to very large software
systems (millions of lines of code, and very large development teams). The
following language features are particularly relevant in this respect:

An extremely strong, static and safetype system, which allows

the programmer to construct powerful abstractions that reflect
the real world, and allows the compiler to detect many logic
faults before they become errors.
Modularity, whereby the compiler directly manages the
construction of very large software systems from sources.
Information hiding; the language separates interfaces from
implementation, and provides fine-grained control over visibility
. Augusta Ada King, Countess of Lovelace.
Readability, which helps programmers review and verify code.
Ada favours the reader of the program over the writer, because
a program is written once but read many times.For example, the syntax bans all ambiguous constructs, so there are
no surprises, in accordance with the Tao of Programming's Law of Least Astonishment. (Some Ada programmers
are reluctant to talk aboutsource code which is often cryptic; they preferprogram text which is close to English
prose.)
Portability: the language definition allows compilers to dif
fer only in a few controlled ways, and otherwise defines
the semantics of programs very precisely; as a result, Ada source text is very portable across compilers and across
target hardware platforms.Most often, the program can be recompiled without any changes. [2]

Standardisation: standards have been a goal and a prominent feature ever since the design of the language in the
late 1970s. The first standard was published in 1980, just 3 years after design commenced. Ada compilers all
 support exactly the same language; the only dialect,SPARK, is merely an annotated subset and can be compiled
with an Ada compiler.
Consequences of these qualities are superior reliability, reusability and maintainability. For example, compared to programs
written in C, programs written in Ada 83 contain"70% fewer internal fixes and 90% fewer bugs", and cost half as much to develop in
the first place.[3] Ada shines even more in software maintenance, which often accounts for about 80% of the total cost of
development. With support for object-oriented programming, Ada 95 may bring even more cost benefit, depending on how objects
are used; although no serious study comparable to Zeigler's has been published.

Programming in the small

In addition to its support for good software engineering practices, which are applicable to general-purpose programming, Ada has
powerful specialised features supporting low-level programming for real-time, safety-critical and embedded systems. Such features
include, among others, machine code insertions, address arithmetic, low-level access to memory, control over bitwise representation
of data, bit manipulations, and a well-defined, statically provable concurrent computing model called the
Ravenscar Profile.

Other features include restrictions (it is possible to restrict which language features are accepted in a program) and features that help
review and certify the object code generated by the compiler
.

Several vendors provide Ada compilers accompanied by minimal run-time kernels suitable for use in certified, life-critical
applications. It is also possible to write Ada programs which require no run-time kernel at all.

It should come as no surprise that Ada is heavily used in the aerospace, defence, medical, railroad, and nuclear industries.

The Language Reference Manual

The Ada Reference Manual (RM) is the official language definition. If you have a problem and no one else can help, you should read
the RM (albeit often a bit cryptic for non-language-lawyers). For this reason, all complete (not draft) pages in Ada Programming contain
links into the appropriate pages in the RM.

This tutorial covers Ada Reference Manual — ISO/IEC 8652:2012(E) Language and Standard Libraries, colloquially known as
Ada 2012 or just Ada.

You can browse the complete Reference Manual ta http://www.ada-auth.org/standards/12rm/html/RM-TTL.html

There are two companion documents:

The Annotated Reference Manual, an extended version of the RM aimed at compiler writers or other persons who
want to know the fine details of the language.
The Rationale for Ada 2012, an explanation of the features of the language.
The Ada Information Clearinghousealso offers the older Ada 83, 95, and 2005 standards and companion documents.

The RM is a collective work under the control of Ada users. If you think you've found a problem in the RM, please report it to the
Ada Conformity Assessment Authority. On this site, you can also see the list of "Ada Issues" raised by other people.

Ada Conformity Assessment Test Suite

Unlike other programming languages, Ada compilers are officially tested, and only those which pass this test are accepted, for
military and commercial work. This means that all Ada compilers behave (almost) the same, so you do not have to learn any dialects.
But because the Ada standard allows the compiler writers to include some additions, you could learn a cool new feature only to find
out that your favourite compiler does not support it...

Programming in Ada
Getting Started
Where to get a compiler, how to compile the source, all answered here:

Basic Ada — Read Me First!

Finding and Installing Ada
Building an Ada program
Ada Development Environment

Language Features
These chapters look at the broader picture, introducing you to the main Ada features in a tutorial style.

Expressions
Control Structures
Type System
Strings
Subprograms
Packages
Input Output
Exceptions
Generics
Tasking
Object Orientation
Contract Based Programming
Memory Management (Access Types)
New in Ada 2005
New in Ada 2012
Containers
Interfacing to other Languages
Coding Standards
Ada Programming Tips
Common Programming Errors

Computer Programming
The following articles are Ada adaptations from articles of the Computer programming book. The texts of these articles are language
neutral but the examples are all Ada.

Algorithms

Chapter 1
Chapter 6
Knuth-Morris-Pratt pattern matcher
Binary search
Error handling
Function overloading
Mathematical calculations
Statements

Control
Variables

Language Reference
Within the following chapters we look at foundations of Ada. These chapters may be used for reference of a particular keyword,
delimiter, operator and so forth.

Lexical elements

Keywords
Delimiters
Operators
Attributes
Aspects
Pragmas

Restrictions

Predefined Language Libraries

This section is a reference of the Ada Standard Library
, which is extensive and well structured. It has these four root packages:

Standard
Ada
Interfaces
System
Besides the Standard Library, compilers usually come with a built-in library
. This chapter describes theGNAT library in particular.

GNAT

External Libraries
This section is a reference of third-party Ada libraries which are not part of the compiler predefined environment but are freely
available.

Libraries

Multi Purpose
Container Libraries
GUI Libraries
Distributed Objects
Database
Web Programming
Input/Output
Platform specific

Programming Ada in Linux

Programming Ada in Windows
Programming Ada in Virtual Machines (Java, .NET)

External resources
Open-source portals
Web Tutorials
Web 2.0

Collections
Printable Versions
The following are collection pages. All collection pages are comprised of groups of the already available pages. You can use them for
printing or to gain a quick overview. Please note that those pages are partly very long.

Tutorial
Show HTML (1,839 kb) — Download PDF (2,663 kb, 243 pages)
Keywords
Show HTML (470 kb) — Download PDF (290 kb, 59 pages)
Operators
Show HTML (232 kb) — Download PDF (189 kb, 27 pages)

Source Code
The Source from the Book is available for download and online browsing. The latter allows "drill down", meaning that you can
follow the links right down to the package bodies in the Ada runtime library
.

References
1. See wikistats (http://en.wikipedia.org/wikistats/wikibooks/EN/Wikibooks_EN.htm) , Category:Book:Ada Programming
or /All Chapters
2. Gaetan Allaert, Dirk Craeynest, Philippe W aroquiers (2003). "European air traffic flow management: porting a large
application to GNU/linux". Proceedings of the 2003 annual ACM SIGAda international conference on Ada .
SIGAda'03. pp. 29–37.doi:10.1145/958420.958426. ISBN 1-58113-476-2.
http://www.sigada.org/conf/sigada2003/SIGAda2003-CDROM/SIGAda2003-Proceedings/p29-allaert.pdf . Retrieved
2009-01-02. Paper by Eurocontrol (PDF, 160 kB) on portability.
3. Stephen F. Zeigler (1995-03-30).Comparing Development Costs of C and Ada. http://archive.adaic.com/intro/ada-
vs-c/ada-vs-c.html. Retrieved 2009-01-02. "Our data indicates that Ada has saved us millions of development
dollars.".

Further reading

Ada 2005 textbooks

John Barnes (2006). Programming in Ada 2005. Addison Wesley. ISBN 0-32-134078-7.
http://www.pearsonhighered.com/educator/academic/product/0,,0321340787,00%2Ben-USS_01DBC.html .
Mordechai Ben-Ari (2009).Ada for Software Engineers (Second Edition with Ada 2005). Springer. ISBN 978-1-
84882-313-6. http://www.springer.com/978-1-84882-313-6.
Alan Burns, Andy Wellings (2007). Concurrent and Real-Time Programming in Ada. Cambridge University Press.
ISBN 9780521866972. http://www.cambridge.org/uk/catalogue/catalogue.asp?isbn=9780521866972.
Nell Dale, John W. McCormick (2007). Ada Plus Data Structures: An Object Oriented Approach(2nd Edition ed.).
Jones and Bartlett. ISBN 0763737941. http://www.jbpub.com/catalog/9780763737948/.
John W. McCormick, Frank Singhoff, Jérôme Hugues (2011).Building Parallel, Embedded, and Real-Time
Applications with Ada. Cambridge University Press.ISBN 9780521197168.
http://www.cambridge.org/gb/knowledge/isbn/item5659578/?site_locale=en_GB.

Ada 2012 textbooks

John Barnes (2014). Programming in Ada 2012. Cambridge University Press.ISBN 9781107424814.
http://www.cambridge.org/gb/academic/subjects/computer-science/software-engineering-and-
development/programming-ada-2012?format=PB .

Manuals and guides

Ada Quality & Style Guide:Guidelines for Professional Programmers (wikibook)
 Rationale for Ada 2005, by John Barnes (2007)
Ada 2005 Reference Manual(2007)

High-Integrity Software
ISO/IEC TR 15942:2000,Guide for the use of the Ada programming language in high integrity systems . ISO Freely
Available Standards [1]
ISO/IEC TR 24718:2005,Guide for the use of the Ada Ravenscar Profile in high integrity systems
. ISO Freely
Available Standards [2]
John Barnes (April 2003).High Integrity Software: The SPARK Approach to Safety and Security. Addison-Wesley.
ISBN 0-321-13616-0.

External links
Ada-Belgium Conference
Ada-Spain Technical Day
Resources Ada Conference UK (videos: 2009, 2007, 2006)

Ada Information Clearinghouse— News and

resources
Ada Answers — Building better software with Ada Associations
comp.lang.ada (Google groups) — International ACM SIGAda — ACM Special Interest Group on Ada
Usenet newsgroup
Ada-Europe
Ada Germany
Research and user groups Ada Russia
Ada-Belgium
Journals: Ada-France
Ada in Denmark
Ada-Letters
Ada Switzerland
Ada User Journal (archive)
International Conferences/Workshops:

International Real-Time Ada Workshop (IRTAW) Free online books/courses

[IRTAW 15]
ACM SIGAda international conference on Ada Computer-Books.us — Online Ada books
[HILT 2012] The Big Online Book of Linux Ada Programming
18th International Conference on Reliable Ada Distilled
Software Technologies — Ada-Europe 2013 Ada in Action
17th International Conference on Reliable Introducing Ada 95
Software Technologies — Ada-Europe 2012
Learn Ada on the Web
Ada Connection 2011 (videos)
Quick Ada
Ada "Developers Room" at FOSDEM(2012)
Ada 95: The Craft of Object-Oriented Programming—
Local conferences: Free textbook originally published by Prentice Hall

Authors and contributors

This Wikibook has been written by:

John Oleszkiewicz (Contributions)

Martin Krischik (Contributions)
Nicolas Kaiser (Contributions)
Manuel Gómez (Contributions)
Larry Luther (Contributions)
Santiago Urueña (Contributions)
Georg Bauhaus (Contributions, more contributions)
C.K.W. Grein (Contributions)
Samuel Tardieu (Contributions)
Bill Findlay (Contributions)
Ludovic Brenta (Contributions)
B. Seidel (Contributions)
Ed Falis
Simon Wright (Contributions)
Pascal Obry
Allen Lew (Contributions)
Unnamed Hero (Contributions)
If you wish to contribute as well you should readContributing and join us at the Contributors lounge.

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