Ada - A Capsule Rationale
Ada is a software development environment, including a programming language,
with the goal of maximizing the
amount of error detection possible as early in the development process as
possible. The default of every software
construct in Ada is safe. In most other languages, the default is unsafe.
One can relax the safe default in Ada
as necessary. It is difficult to promote a language with default of unsafe
to safe. The error detection process
can begin at the specification stage when Ada is used as a PDL. It
continues through every other stage of a
software engineering project because the compiler keeps track of the
relationships between every associated
entity in the product. This checking can even extend to the real-time and
concurrent facets of a software design
because tasking is built-in to the language. This permits the compiler to
do consistency checking at every level
of even the largest and most complicated of Ada programs.
In addition to maximizing error detection through the compiler, Ada
emphasizes understanding and expressiveness.
The solution to nearly any programming problem can be expressed in any
programming language. We call that
expressibility. More important is the ease of expressing that solution. We
call that expressiveness. In many
cases, programming languages are designed to express solutions in a targeted
problem domain. Ada's syntax,
structure, and semantic model facilitates the design of software components
that directly express the needs of
any given software application domain. At the same time, Ada allows the
developer to easily place restrictions
on a design to avoid features inappropriate in the solution of a given
application problem.
Contributed by: Richard Riehle
Contributed on: June 1, 2000
License: Public Domain
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