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Ada

To program in Ada we are going to use gnat-gcc to get started now try Quick Start.

The Ada Reference Manual is a very important reference book but the examples are buried all through it. So I have tried to dig them out and put them together and write some explanations so as to produce a more hands on manual here Ada Language. Just I haven't done any explanations so really its only useful to look at some out of context syntax.

A search on google for gnat-gcc turns up a lot of stuff.

Having now bought the book "Ada 2005" by John Barnes which is almost the only book! It appears to be pretty good in that the first four chapters whistle through everything and later chapters deal with things in greater detail. As a fluent C programmer it works for me.

What I like about Ada;

  • This is the language used in many safety critical systems. It has a less a good reputation from that point of view but one must not forget that the people using it were subjected to many disciplines that are not imposed on C, C++ and Java programmers.

What I don't like about Ada;

  • The language is very verbose int in C is shorter than integer in Ada. It doesn't make code more readable to use long words rather than short ones. Some function calls I cloned from C to Ada were 1.5 times longer.
  • I wanted to pass a bunch of constant strings to a function but making sure I pass references to the strings themselves rather than have the code copy them for no reason. TODO I am still looking into this.

Here are links to two important websites and some links to pages on those websites that look particularly interesting.

The Ada Information Clearing House;

Libre - free software and open source development with Ada;

Some other important links are;

  • Code Examples


    © Tom de Havas 2011. The information under this section is my own work it may be reproduced without modification but must include this notice.







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