The Ada language and environment

A brief outline of the history and current status of Ada is followed by a description of salient language features and a discussion of the proposed Ada environment. Language-level support of modularity may result in substantially cheaper program development and maintenance, and will have a profound effect on both programming style and methods of teaching. Environment requirements include a data base for program development and maintenance, a kernel which is the interface for portability, and a minimal toolset which provides a common base for individual environments. The UNIX approach could be used as a starting point for developing Ada environments, but would have to be modified to reflect military embedded computer requirements and the fact that Ada rather than C would be the system programming language. It is predicted that Ada usage will overtake Fortran usage by 1995.